Professor Ian Shaw. Presented at 2nd International Conference Sociology and Social Work, 30-31 May 2012.

1. Sociological Social
Work
Ian Shaw
2nd International Conference Sociology and Social Work
May 30-31st 2012

2. 
Chicago

Doing Sociological Social Work
Two themes

3. 
„atomic view of the individual‟ E W
Burgess

practising history

Challenging social work and sociology
Why does this matter?

4. 
What seems to you to
be the values and
limitations of the first
person method of case
recording for purposes
(a) of social treatment
of cases; (b) of
sociological research?‟
Ernest - 1

My proposal is actually
quite simple and I
think, entirely feasible
and reasonable, in spite
of the fact that I do not
anticipate its immediate
and general adoption.
It is to enter into the
case record statements
made by all persons
visited in nearly as
humanly possible the
language which they
used. (Burgess, 1927:
192)

5. 
strongly opposed to having
the language of the father
and the mother in the
home, of the landlord, or the
teacher, or of the
employer, translated into the
language of the social worker
on the case. The translation
invariably and inevitably
distorts the point of view and
the attitude of the person
interviewed. Each informant
has a right to have himself
appear in the record in his
own language. (pp.192-93)
Ernest - 2

Existing case records
seldom, or never, picture
people in the language of
Octavia Hill, with their
“passions, hopes, and
history” or their
“temptations”, or “the little
scheme they have made of
their lives, or would make if
they had encouragement.”
The characters in case
records do not move, and
act, and have their being as
persons. They are
depersonalized, they become
Robots, or mere cases
undifferentiated except by
the recurring problems they
present. (1928: 526-27)

6. 
„selection
of facts
amounts to an
implicit interpretation
of them‟
(Sheffield, 1922: 48).
Ada

„the traditions and training of
the observer more or less
condition the nature of the
fact-items that make their
appearance… In this sense
the subject-matter of much
social study is unstable. Not
only do two students
perceive different facts, they
actually in a measure make
different facts to be
perceived.‟ She is using
„student‟ in the wider sense
of anyone who is
studying, including
researchers and social
workers.

7. Case study research, and the closely
connected development of life
histories, were central to Chicago School
sociology.
 Sociologists accessed urban life in some
ways through social work agency records.
 The term „case‟ as developed and strongly
owned by sociologists was a direct „loan
word‟ from social workers.

Case work

8. 

The case history is… appearing increasingly in
professional and even in popular
journals, and is thus becoming, not only a
technical tool, but also a more general means
of approach to the under-standing of human
behaviour (Bartlett, 1928: 379)
‟The social reform community began to use
the casebook format shortly after 1900, a
practice that grew naturally out of the work
of charities organization societies‟ (Abbott
and Egloff, 2008: 236).
Social work and the case

9. 



Making the unfolding development of services apparent. „By the
study of records selected in this way students should develop a
sense of history in their attitude toward the art of family case
work‟ (Breckinridge, 1924: 4)
The inclusion of supplementary reports enables the student to
„develop what might be called a sense of actuality and of reality‟
(p.4).
„The successful use of these records should produce a habit of
thought…a power of analysis of community relationships‟ (p.4).
This reformist agenda is more explicit in the final sentence of her
Introduction. „It is hoped that the study of the case records in this
volume may successfully develop in the student a quickened
sense of the responsibility of the case worker for necessary
community action‟ (p15).
„An appreciation of the difficulties under which all agencies do
their work‟ (p.5).
Breckinridge

10. „(O)nly the eclectic combination of
ethnography, statistics, life history, and
organizational history could do full justice
to the multiple layers of spatial and
temporal contexts for social facts‟
(Abbott, 1998 p.207).
 „Fundamental to the case-study method is
the effort to view the different aspects of
the problem as an organic, inter-related
whole‟ (Vivien Palmer, 1928: 20).

Sociology and the case

11. 
it „can help us to study the processes of
group life… (S)ociologists…lack the
opportunity to do so which the social
worker possesses. Large-scale
investigations do not bring us close to it.
Statistical information cannot yield this
knowledge… It is only those who are in a
position to use the case method…who can
open out for us its possibilities‟
(McIver, 1931 p.82f).
Robert McIver

12. 
referred to case study as a process of
accumulating a mass of data to afford a
„complete and vivid picture of the
interrelated factors…‟ He also argues, in
terms typical of his Chicago
colleagues, that one can only understand
the delinquent act in the total context of
its setting. It is „particularly the life
history document‟ that „reveals the
process or sequence of events…‟
Clifford Shaw

13. 
„Where would you rather live than on the
street where your family lives at present?
Why? What's the best thing about your
neighborhood? What don't you like about
your neighborhood? Why? What wrong
goings-on do you know about in your
neighborhood? What's the worst thing you
know about that goes on in the
neighborhood?....‟ (1928 pp 162ff)
Walter Reckless

14. 
For social work it was linked to the reform
agenda

For sociology it was central to efforts to
understand the community
the case was not limited to or
even primarily an individual
category

15. 
social work - „straight furrow‟ and „field
cultivation‟

sociology - debates about statistical and
field research approaches
Internal differences

16. 



Sheffield's assumption of vague, undefined social
norms and a psychology of “sentiments” equally
vague and confused‟ (p63
as subjective as the position she criticises such
that she „loses sight of, obscures and confuses
the behaviour behind the term‟.
„Happily there was no crystallization at this level
of development in social case work‟ (p.64).
„The problem is externalized and causes are
located in the environment‟ (p.183) - „the
sociological phase‟ in social work‟s development.
Virginia Robinson, 1930
the elixir of psychodynamic
explanation

17. 
research findings as a practice resource

the value for practice of sociological
method
Doing Sociological Social Work

18. 
Historically, the influence of science on
direct social work practice has taken two
forms. One is the use of the scientific
method to shape practice activities, for
example, gathering evidence and forming
hypotheses about a client‟s problem. The
other form is the provision of scientific
knowledge about human beings, their
problems and ways of resolving them.
(Reid, 1998: 3)
Bill Reid

19. 
a framework of embedded qualitative
evaluation and inquiry as a dimension of
good practice

Shaw, I. (2011) Evaluating in Practice.
Aldershot: Ashgate Publications
‘qualitative social work’

20. 
intellectual reciprocity based on
egalitarian respect
to speak to the social science
community

21. A narrowness of conception of intervention possibilities. For
most practitioners it assumes practice as delivered through
interviewing – and more than that, a certain kind of
interviewing that easily becomes routinized and formulaic.
 An unhelpful – because again narrowly conceived – conception
of the relationship between research and practice. The
„application of research knowledge‟ approach has a number of
problems but the central one for our purposes is that it
renders the „method‟ of social work invisible.
 An unduly deferential and subservient conception of the
relationship between social science and social work.
 A constrained view of what is entailed in social work
evaluation. Typically a post hoc, evaluation-as-accountability
model

social work problems

22. translating e.g. „provide the tools and
translations necessary for discovering and
witnessing clinical stories and knowledge‟
(Miller and Crabtree, 2005: 609)
 Counter-colonizing
 interruption
 inhabiting

Doing Qualitative Social Work

23. 







Ethnography and its variants,
life histories and (auto)biography,
visual methods,
interviews in their diverse sociological forms,
narrative,
simulations,
documents,
a range of lesser known innovatory
qualitative methods
This includes….

24. a relationship between sociology and
social work something like two adjacent
„open systems.‟
 For sociology, for example, I call for a
greater responsiveness to the conceptual
and methodological challenges offered by
social work;
 for social work a readiness to conceive of
a sociological practice,

Social work and sociology

25. 
the nature of a „practical‟ sociology

joint working group?
Supporting the development of
sociological social work