Introduction

Abstract

Social policy as a specialist area of academic study and debate is a relatively recent development in the intellectual division of labour. Social administration, as it was usually called until the 1970s, had its late nineteenth-century origins in the development of the profession of social work. It was recognised that the growing interest and concern with social work activity required more expert, trained personnel, if it was to establish itself as a serious professional activity. This gave social administration in its earlier years a marked practical and vocational bias. To some extent this bias remains, although as the subject has evolved and matured so has its scope and the range of interests which it addresses, and hence its appeal to a much wider constituency of students and scholars.