Introduction

Abstract

The occupation of social work is currently in a period of change — both in Britain and many other Western countries — as the role of the state as a direct provider of services declines, resources for welfare reduce and new styles of management and accountability are introduced. This makes it both difficult to look at the ethics and values of social work (because old values may be becoming irrelevant and new ones beginning to emerge) but also particularly important. Social work has always been a difficult occupation to define because it has embraced work in a number of different sectors (public, private, independent, voluntary), a multiplicity of different settings (residential homes, area offices, community development projects) with workers taking on a range of different tasks (caring, controlling, empowering, campaigning, assessing, managing) for a variety of different purposes (redistribution of resources to those in need, social control and rehabilitation of the deviant, prevention or reduction of social problems). This diversity, or ‘fragmentation’ as some have called it, is currently increasing, which raises the question of whether the occupation can retain the rather tenuous identity it was seeking to develop in the 1970s and 1980s (Langan 1993).