Assessing Social Work Theories

Abstract

How can we assess the role of social work theory in social work and the place of the various theories in practice? In the first Chapter, I argued that theory, like social work itself, was socially constructed by the participants and the context in which they met to carry out the activity of social work. It follows from this view that theory is not solely an intellectual development, but responds to the social forces creating social work at this moment, many of which come from practice. We need to look at the social circumstances in which social work theory is used in practice to see how current trends and developments in theory reflect present social assumptions.