Abstract
I have been invited to comment on three essays which critically draw on my ‘Sociological Approach to Social Problems’. Both the form and the content of that comment [sic] present challenges. I am in no sense an examiner, so I have decided against any detailed appraisal of each essay piece by piece, though I have read each, re-read and read again. Instead my comment treats the essays as a swatch of material with a distinctive weave bearing a common brand. The issue of possible content was also a challenge in view of the phrase in one essay that begins ‘Since the time of Timms’ writing…’. Perhaps my choice of social problems almost 50 years ago would appear dated in contrast to people trafficking or the treatment, in a broad and clinical sense, of GBT (gay, bisexual and transsexual), clearly the configuration of particular social problems changes over time. When I studied as a psychiatric social worker in the 1950s, drug addiction was considered such a small problem that it hardly merited attention, whilst it was central to the study of alcohol abuse to treat the public drinking house primarily as a homo-erotic precinct. Whilst the problems are each investigated in terms of distinctive clusters of literature with which I am not familiar, it does appear that the essays do find some use for my earlier monograph. Moreover, their responses are couched in conversations rather than confrontational terms. So, it is not a case as it were of Decline and Fall, though I am confused by some of the issues raised concerning apparently a social work that is not public or a social work that is itself a science. I once defined social work as altruism under public auspices but as I shall later discuss, I should have given more thought to the changing ways in which ‘the other’ is conceived.
The pattern mix of the brand under consideration has itself historical roots. The nature of the relationship between sociology and social work was explored in the American Journal of Sociology, if my memory is to be trusted, in the 1930s. It was also in that decade that some social workers celebrated the changing movement from the dominance of sociology to that of psychology. This is most evident in VP Robinson’s ‘Changing psychology in social casework’, first published in 1930. Reliance on an individualistic psychology as dominant figures also in more contemporary accounts. A memoir of the late Olive Stevenson (2013) shows some curiosity about the outer social world, even asking her head of department for tutorials in sociology. Yet she was opposed to anything like the integration of sociology and social work, seeing the exploration of any world outside the psyche primarily in terms of late 19th century reformers. My monograph was an attempt to explore the usefulness of a sociological approach precisely for social work. As I now discuss, it could have attended more carefully to differences within sociology.
A phenomenological study which I later used to illustrate problems in how the subjects of social works are categorised (Green, 1983) contains an argument over different ways the concept of social structure is understood in the perspectives of ethnomethodology on the one hand and on the other the sociologist John Rex’s eclectic compound of Weberian methodology with humanistic and empirical Marxism (pp. 194–195). If we go on to apply Webber’s meaningful individual action specifically to the study of social problems, we could ponder the stern work ethic of Protestantism as both cause of and solution to the changing social problems of the times. If we attend to issues of conflict and control in a Marxist context, we will emphasise both the coercion involved in social work – a consideration insufficiently raised in the client speaks – and the force of the different ways in which the subjects of social intervention are described, as supplicants, applicants, clients, users, members of an oppressed community and so on. The study by Richard Titmuss of blood donation extolled the gift by anonymous, non-commercial donors as a sign of participative citizenship. Concerns of the bonds between citizens in different societies should now be reconsidered as a global approach is advocated in the study of the anonymous semen donation which affects the different interests of donor, recipient and policy makers (Daniels and Haimes, 1998). Consideration should also be given to the ramifications of taking the obligation of social work to keep the stranger (Eagleton, 2009) or an obligation depending on the vulnerability of others (Goodin, 1985).
Giddens in 1982 wrote ‘Sociology: a brief but critical introduction’, in which he stressed the combination of the sociological imagination with historical sensibility and anthropological insight (p. 22). Sociology cannot be grasped as simply empirical. Nor can we rely on concepts people use as somehow timeless, ‘they emerge and evolve, change and sometimes decay in human thought and speech and action’ (Warnock, 1971: 5). The essays under consideration sometimes suggest a certain scepticism in my monograph. Oakshott commends both scepticism and faith as necessary to face a situation depicted in the quotation at the conclusion of his inaugural lecture, ‘The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil’ (Oakshott, 1962: 111–136).