Abstract
One measure of the change in social work is that nobody can now embark on a general discussion of it, however brief, without at least a token acceptance of the role of social workers as agents of social control. Once the battering ram of radical criticism and a source of shock and horror for traditionalists, the idea has now passed into commonplace discourse, almost to the point of being irrelevant. Yet it is on our analysis of this particular function that our approach to social work must turn, because it highlights the standards by which we work and poses the question of our ultimate loyalties.
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Notes and references
Bill Jordan, Poor Parents (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974) p. viii.
H. Specht, ‘Disruptive Tactics’, in R. Kramer and H. Specht (eds), Readings in Community Organisation Practice (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969) p. 384.
R. Miliband, ‘The Problem of the Capitalist State’, in R. Blackburn (ed.), Ideology and the Social Sciences (London: Fontana, 1972) p. 254.
P. Corrigan and P. Leonard, Social Work Practice under Capitalism (London: Macmillan, 1978).
V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969) pp. 8–9.
V. George and P. Wilding, Ideology and Social Welfare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977) p. 90.
Quoted by R. Miliband in The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969) p. 55.
S. Cohen, ‘Manifestos for Action’, in R. Bailey and M. Brake (eds), Radical Social Work (London: Arnold, 1975) p. 86.
K. Marx, ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970) p. 181.
G. Pearson, The Deviant Imagination (London: Macmillan, 1975) ch. 6.
See also G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford University Press, 1971).
B. Heraud, Sociology and Social Work (Oxford: Pergamon, 1970) p. 198.
Quoted by Zofia Butrym, The Nature of Social Work (London: Macmillan, 1976) p. 113.
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© 1979 Mike Simpkin
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Simpkin, M. (1979). Social work, the state and social control. In: Trapped within Welfare. Crisis Points. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86133-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86133-0_3
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