Howard Goldstein

The Knowledge Base of Social Work Practice: Theory, Wisdom, Analogue, or Art?

Lured by the promise of the scientific method, social work turned away from its own foundations of practice wisdom and therefore has not entirely succeeded in developing its own value base, theories, and methods. A historical overview traces the tendency to accumulate theories that are, in many ways, alien to the professions original mission. An alternative approach is proposed based on the combination of practice wisdom, the humanities, and the contributions of the emerging interpretive human sciences.

Starting Where the Client Is

The workers ability to truly understand a clients version of reality offers the means by which the client is enabled to take responsibility for life changes. An understanding of modern cognitive theory, and how it can be utilized, makes possible the achievement of such ability.

Strength or Pathology: Ethical and Rhetorical Contrasts in Approaches to Practice

Organizing concepts of “strength” and “pathology” are explored from the perspective of the limitations of language in defining and treating human problems. The derivation of these terms is described as is their entry into the lexicon and procedures of the social work profession. Each concept is examined in terms of its relevance for practice. The strength orientation is shown to be more responsive to the humanistic, ethical, and political conditions that characterize the helping process.

If Social Work Hasn't Made Progress as a Science, Might it be an Art?

A restless mind wonders how things might have turned out had social work chosen a different ideological path. After all, our profession’s evolution was not preordained: all social institutions and professions are susceptible to countless contingencies, not the least of which are the influences of personalities, politics, and chance. Suppose we had heeded Jane Addams and Florence Kelly’s plea for educated humanism rather than Mary Richmond and Abraham Flexner’s demand for a scientific foundation for practice. What might have happened had we elected Adler rather than Freud as our psychological mentor, or, for that matter, had we favored and nurtured our own emerging practice wisdom? And how might things have turned out had we tempered our enchantment with the glowing promises of the social sciences by attending to Lindemann’s qualms about the abrogation of values, ends, and social ethics that is the price of marriage to the scientific method? This question leads to another, more incisive query: given the intellectual road we have traveled, can we say with a n y assurance that it has made us more effective, expert, and sophisticated in our work with clients? For that mat. ter, what does “better” signify? As G. K. Chesterton (1932) states, “The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.” In Chesterton’s terms, does the road we have traveled represent progress or is it a matter of growth and maturation? This is not just a question of semantics. Progress is the benchmark of science, which is characterized by its unsentimental pursuit of truth, the documentation of facts, and the forging of laws and their applications based on these facts. In this pursuit of truth, doctrines that no longer survive the tests of scientific study are, at least in principle, discarded. Growth and maturation, on the other hand, stand for another kind of discovery: the inward search to find one’s core of strength and wisdom. Although wisdom may not be quantifiable or provable according to accepted scientific standards, its roots in reason, common sense, experience, and values make it compelling nonetheless. Whereas progress in science is based on the assumption that certain answers, albeit tentative, are attainable by way of rigorous methods, growth or maturation is an openended process in which the human condition is enigmatic, subject to question, doubt, and serendipitous insights.

The Limits and Art of Understanding in Social Work Practice

If quantity is an any way a measure of ones preoccupation with something, then the number of pages I devoted to the question of understanding in my book, Social Work Practice: A Unitary Approach (1973) was a sure indication of my concern at that time. Altogether, over eighty pages — more than one-third of the book — were given over to what I called, “The Strategies of Study and Evaluation.” Exhaustively, this section covered the phases of practice and the characteristics of the various client systems that are met in practice within each phase. Pure overkill: the attempt to cover the myriad data and details of this plan would be beyond the scope and time of any practitioner.

What's So Special?

A good question. One might ask why this issue of Families in Society earns the title of a “special issue.” Usually, such issues are devoted to a particular topic, as was the case with last years publication on ethics in practice (May/June 1998). In the past, other special issues have been concerned with such vital and timeless matters as “social work challenges” and “directions and multicultural practice.”

Education for social work practice: a cognitive, cross-cultural approach

Howard Goldstein, DSW, is protessor at the School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. The question of the relevance of western models, theories and methods of social work practice for professional education in other nations has become a matter of increasing international interest. Concerns about this matter take many forms: whether or not, for example, western perspectives on practice are really responsive to the personal and social needs of the populations of other regions; the implications of built-in cultural biases; and whether it is incumbent

Editorial) Social Work at the Millennium

DIVERSITY IS THE THEME of this special issue of Families in Society, a theme that has increasingly engaged our interest as the profession approaches this chronological threshold. We generally think of diversity as an attribute of others apart from ourselves who are defined by their respective beliefs, customs, cultures, or ethnic identities. The Asian-Americans, Native-Americans, and Mexican-Americans discussed in this issue are examples.

A Cognitive-Humanistic Approach to the Hard-to-Reach Client

The reluctant client challenges the worker because of the cognitive distance between them. Concrete, convergent thinkers, such clients are baffled by the abstract, reflective, and introspective. A cognitive-humanistic approach bridges this distance by starting where the client is and by working within the clients world of experience.

Writing to be Read: The Place of the Essay in Social Work Literature

As a literary form, the essay is a desirable means of communicating knowledge that can serve either as an adjunct or an alternative to the conventional “scholarly” works found in the pages of our professional journals. Moreover, as a literary form, the essay is not alien to social work literature. Mary Richmond’s commentaries on and analyses of topics as diverse as a plea for poetry, the training of charity workers, and the role of the social worker in a changing world, collected in The Long View (Richmond, 1971), are essays that still provoke and retain their freshness. Predating the profession’s scientific disposition, the philosophies and studied opinions, deftly written by Grace Coyle, Gisela Konopka, Eduard Lindeman, and other scholars, also can be enjoyed as essays. More renowned, of course, are the elegant essays of Freud, Jung, Rank, and James in psychology or Max Weber in sociology that have traveled well in social work‘s progress and development. My argument is simple and straightforward-at least at the start: Because social work‘s primary interest is the person in the situation, our understanding would be furthered by a body of literature that in language and style more closely resembles the nuances of the human situation. Scholarly treatises in professional books and journal articles lean toward formality, abstractness, and the use of jargon not usually a part of the human conditions the writers strive to describe or explain. Such writing stands in contrast with the genres of the novel, drama, and film, which, though less cerebral and certainly less abstract, effectively arouse more than just our intellectual sensibilities about human concerns. The essay serves as a link that draws together the aesthetics of the humanities and the intellect of science. This literary form awakens our critical and reflective thinking about essentially ambiguous, personal, or social issues. It encourages the use of imagery, metaphor, and other elements of style that may capture qualities of human circumstances in play outside the margins of scientific discourse.