Noel Timms - Social Work Values

Originally published in 1983 Social Work Values is a sustained enquiry about the present situation of social work. It describes the treatment of social work values in the social work literature and in research, and pursues three distinct avenues towards an improvement on the present unsatisfactory treatment. First, the book introduces and encourages more philosophical reflection on the customary lists of social work values. Second, it investigates three social work controversies: between the Charity Organisation Society and the Socialists; between the Functionalist and the Diagnostic schools of social work; and between radical Marxists and the rest. Third, and finally it explores the treatment of value and values in economics, sociology, ordinary usage, and philosophy, in order to establish the distinctive elements to which the term values is applied.

First published in 1983

by Routledge & Kegan Paul plc

This edition first published in 2018 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

1983 Noel Timms

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A Library of Congress record exists under LCCN: 82023096

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-37111-8 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-429-42774-9 (ebk)

Noel Timms

But it is one thing to pursue a course of action which involves a thought, and another clearly to think the thought.

Kirkham Grey,

Philanthropy and the State (1908),

pp. 25-6

The main part of the research on which this book is based was undertaken in a not altogether uninterrupted year, October 1980 to September 1981, when I was the grateful recipient of a Personal Research Grant from the Social Science Research Council. My friends David Watson and Bob Sugden have helped me considerably by their comments respectively on . My wife, Rita, has read and criticised the whole manuscript. For her help in this and in everything else I thank her: and, in token, I dedicate this book to her. Without me and our children she would have written on the subject a better book and sooner.

This book is about a particular grouping of seemingly ordered and organised values, namely social work values. One of its main arguments is that these values should always be considered in a context wider than that supplied by ideas of social work social work within the context of social welfare is but one example. Much more usually, social work values are exhibited rather than analysed and are treated as commodities domestic to social work itself. For this reason, and also because I wish to argue the case of complexity in the problems raised in systematic discussion of social work values and in their resolution, this book begins with a summary of the main arguments and the general approach, despite the risk as Moses said when reading the Tablets, So much is lost in the summary.

Those writing about social work and those practising it refer frequently to values. It may be that values figure in accounts and conversation in this occupation more frequently than in others, but, in my view, the frequency of reference is neither accidental nor purely ornamental. Those elements discussed under the single rubric values are crucial to the conception and practice of social work. However, it is difficult to see how crucial they are, the kind of importance they have, because we try to work with values as a completely undifferentiated notion. The word value is indeed applied to distinguishable elements; problems arise because they are so rarely distinguished. Almost any kind of belief and obligation, anything preferred for any reason or for no apparent reason at all, any objective in the short or the long run, any ideal or rule, is heaped into a large pantechnicon carrying the device Social Work Values will travel anywhere.

This suggests that while we can apply to social work values the central importance Hobson assigned to values in social welfare generally, his reference to ordered, organised values may appear optimistic. The distinguishable elements fail, as we have just seen, to make obvious logical order ideals do not function in the same way as rules, valuations differ from obligations. They also are difficult to recognise as organised. Just as the list of social work values that is treated as customary lacks coherence either as a code of practice or as a summary of principles derived from one or more traditions of practice, so a consideration of the history of social work suggests that what are usually articulated are fragments rather than the story as an organised whole. The current programme to encourage belief in the unitary nature of social work activities easily conveys interested assumptions about both value consensus amongst contemporary social workers and also the unified nature of the traditions leading to modern social work. However, ways of working in social welfare and the ways in which practitioners have viewed men and women and society have often been in conflict even in what appears to be the same tradition. The kind of careful historical work required to establish such a view is exemplified in Pullans study (1971) of philanthropy in Renaissance Venice. He warns, for example, against the dangerous assumption that at any given time one can distinguish a single, unitary Catholic attitude to the problem of the poor in the sixteenth century, the views of Mendicants in Flanders and Spain differed