Justice as a Value

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Justice as a Value
in Social Work

Social workers once aided
striking workers and helped
bring about social change.
What are we doing now?
We are often caught up in
political campaigning for a
bill,
proposition,
candidates, etc. rather than
focusing on the macro
change.
—Natalia Ventura,
Southern Chair of
the Social Action Council of
California, 2005

Since the 1960s and 1970s, justice
issues have received considerable
attention in writings on social work. The
spotlight has intensified even though
radical critics consider the shift more
rhetorical window-dressing than a program
implemented in practice or supported
through professional training (Reisch &
Andrews, 2001; Wagner, 2000). Social
justice and related themes stand out in the
documents of major organizations—the
National Association of Social Workers
(NASW) and the Council on Social Work
Education (CSWE)—that represent the
profession and that shape the train-

ing of social workers.
The codes and standards of the
NASW (2003) address professional
ethics.
Professional
commitment
centers on issues that stress human

rights and interpersonal resources. The
core values guiding the enterprise are
service, social justice, personal dignity
and worth, the importance of human
rela-tionships, and integrity.
The guiding notion is that “social
workers
challenge
social
injustice.”
Professionals are supposed to “pursue
social change, particularly with and on
behalf of vulnerable and oppressed
individuals and groups.” Social workers’
reform efforts are to concentrate on issues
of “poverty, unemployment, dis-crimination
and other forms of social injustice.” These
activities seek to pro-mote sensitivity to and
knowledge about oppression. “Social
workers strive to ensure access to needed
services and resources, equality of
opportunity, and meaningful participation
for all people” (NASW, 2003, pp. 381–395).

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MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

Under the heading of “Social Workers’
Ethical Responsibilities to the Broader
Society,” justice comes in for further
operationalization.
“Social
workers
should,” the codes and standards
document (NASW, 2003) states,


promote the general welfare of
society, from local to global
levels, and the development of
people, their communities, and
environments. Social workers
should advocate for living
conditions conducive to the
fulfillment of basic human needs
and should promote social,
economic, political and cultural
values and institutions that are
compatible with the realization of
social justice.



facilitate informed participation
by the public in shaping social
poli-cies and institutions.



engage in social and political
action that seeks to ensure that
all people have equal access to
resources, employment, services
and opportunities they require to
meet their basic human needs
and to develop fully. Social
workers should be aware of the
impact of the political arena on
practice and should advocate for
changes in policy and legislation
to improve social conditions in
order to meet basic human
needs and promote social
justice. (pp. 394–395)

A similar insistence on justice crops
up repeatedly in other NASW declarations about economic programs,
electoral politics, environmental policy,
health care, housing, immigrants and
refugees, international relations, and

human rights.
The first formal statement of the
Council on Social Work Education
(CSWE) about curricula dates from
1962. In this, and in a number of subsequent documents, attention is given
to social policy. However, it was not
until 1992 that economic justice and
populations at risk received explicit
notice. By 1994, the need to promote
social and economic justice in professional curricula was pressed still more
clearly:
Programs of social work education
must provide an understanding of
the dynamics and consequences of
social economic injustice, including
all forms of human oppression and
discrimination. They must provide
students with the skills to promote
social change and to implement a
wide range of interventions that
further
the
achievement
of
individual and collective social and
economic justice. Theoretical and
practice content must be provided
about strategies of intervention for
achieving social and economic
justice and for combating the
causes
and
effects
of
institutionalized
forms
of
oppression. (CSWE, 1994)
Since then, curricular statements
stressing issues of multiculturalism have
become more common. Some
commentators (e.g., Gilbert, 1995; Piven

& Cloward, 1997) view the rise of
identity politics as a distraction that
undermines the struggle for human
rights.

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Justice as a Value in Social Work

In sum, both the professional
association and the accrediting body of
the professional schools exhort social
workers, in their role as change agents,
to correct and undo injustice. The NASW
uses the tentative “should.” The CSWE
prefers the imperative “must.” The
difference probably reflects the different
scope of the organizations more than any
practical variance in their commitment to
justice. The NASW is much larger but
more heterogeneous. The CSWE has a
narrower, somewhat more focused
mission, with sharper teeth through its
powers of accreditation.
These documents leave no doubt
about the overarching importance of
social justice for the profession. But
“overarching” can easily be translated
into “generic bromides” and posturing.
The task is to see how social work
authors have emphasized one or another
specific facet of these guidelines.
The approaches we will look at are
representative of a range of formula-tions
rather than exhaustive. I have selected a
variety of works that stand along a
continuum. Some positions claim that
only certain interventions are consistent
with the justice mandate. Alternative
views adopt radical, reformist, and
distributive ideas about justice in social
work.

___________________________ A
Schizophrenic Profession?
The statements about justice issued by
the NASW and the CSWE came late to a
profession whose core method has been
casework and, more recently, clinical
practice. There seems to be a
discrepancy between officially sanctioned principles and the courses offered
in most schools. A similar gap appears

5

between the justice ethic as a principle
on the one hand and, on the other,
values in tune with the jobs that social
workers actually perform.
In a typical introductory class,
students learn about the history of the
pro-fession. Mary Richmond and Jane
Addams are identified as the founding
mothers. While Richmond was the
decisive figure in professionalizing social
work, Addams and the settlement
movement associated with her have
remained at the roots of the justice thrust
in the profession (Franklin, 1986).

Mary Richmond played a crucial role
in bringing social work to profes-sional
standing. Together with the backing of
the Russell Sage Foundation, her
influence on the fledgling profession
was decisive. Richmond’s views took
shape during her years of work with the
Charity Organizations and at the John
Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. This
experience helps explain her liking for
both the practice of casework and the
medical model of interven-tion. Her
book on social diagnosis (Richmond,
1917) merged these two pref-erences
and was instrumental in giving
professional status and scientific
credibility to the activities of social
workers (Lubove, 1965; Reamer, 1994;
Specht & Courtney, 1994; Wenocur &
Reisch, 1983). This was the ground in
which the therapeutic direction, with a
few collectively oriented excur-sions,
germinated, grew, and came to
dominate the field (Wenocur & Reisch,
1983).

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MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

Jane Addams had more formal
schooling than Mary Richmond, and she
had close ties with the Department of
Sociology at the University of Chicago.
But she was suspicious of the move to
professionalize social work. An activist
reformer, Addams saw it as a threat to
the progressive mission of the field. She
feared that the search for professional
respectability
made
social
work
vulnerable to cooptation (Franklin, 1986).
Addams preferred com-munity practice.
Her vision of social problems was
sociological rather than psychological.
She aimed at changing policies on
women’s work, child care, health,
housing, immigrant education, and
integration. She pushed for the creation
of juvenile courts.
Addams became involved in the
politics of the Progressive movement.
This was a commitment that “proprofession” social workers made no
secret of disliking. In addition, most social
workers saw her tireless opposition to the
entrance of the United States in World
War I as unpatriotic. Addams eventually
became a Nobel Peace Prize laureate,
but her direct influence on social work’s
rise to professionalism was marginal
(Franklin, 1986). Nevertheless, her ideas
were absorbed into and have remained
part of the identity of social work, even if
they have taken the rather disembodied
form of “values” that are rarely integrated
in practice (Reisch & Andrews, 2001;
Specht & Courtney, 1994; Wagner,
2000). Hers was a moral victory, not one
that set an institutional course. So, a split
developed between the indi-vidualtherapeutic slant of the profession and
the justice and social change goals
expressed in NASW and CSWE policy
statements. The history of the profession
shows a relentless, if not entirely linear,

ascent of the therapeutic approach in
training as well as practice.
How did the individual perspective
gain so much ground? It is not as if,
during the early days, there was a lack of
practitioners to push a vision of clients
within a larger community—the personin-environment
perspective.
The
preeminence
of
Mary
Richmond
notwithstanding, there were a number of
reformers
among
pioneering
professionals
(e.g.,
Follett,
1909;
Lindeman, 1921), and the staying power
of the justice norm as a minority current
is evi-dent. Still, the puzzle remains. Why
has the impulse toward justice lost out, in
relative terms, compared to the
therapeutic turn?
Although they differ in details, accounts
of the origins and development of the
profession are fairly consistent. Several
factors combined to support “the triumph of
the therapeutic.” Besides the search for
professional credibility, these include social
demands for specific services, the priorities
of funding sources, political pressure, and
the dominance of a distinctive social
ideology.

In a market economy like that of the
United States, professional status
matters. It is essential for gaining
political, legal, and economic control of
an occupation. Certification requires
evidence of delivering a unique service,
demonstration of its utility, and a rationale
that justifies the necessity of that service.
Furthermore, professional recognition
has to be based on a body of knowledge.
This entails elaborating a set of codified
interventions that can be imparted to
future professionals. Accreditation and
licensing regulate the

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process. In short, in order to legitimize
its claim of exclusivity in an occupational sphere, a new profession has to
justify a unique approach and impart
skills that address social needs.
The medical profession provided the
outstanding template for social work in its
embryonic days. Social work’s typical
method of intervention was case-work with
psychiatric overtones. In its desire to stand
on its own—to distance itself from volunteer
charitable work and from an auxiliary role
within the medical orbit—social work was
drawn to Freudian theories and, somewhat
later, to what Specht (1990) terms popular
therapies. The profession drifted toward
clinical social work. This attraction did not
take hold in a historical vacuum. These
trends gained momentum in response to a
real demand for such services—notably,
the need to treat the traumas of wartime
combatants.
But this is not the whole story. In the
1930s, during the New Deal, the demand
for social workers grew with the expansion
of public programs. Schools of social work
responded by training students in the
administration of services. In the 1960s, the
War on Poverty provided an enormous
stimulus to community organizers, and
enrollments in community organization
courses reached a peak (Reisch &
Wenocur, 1986). Later, with the fading of
the con-ditions that gave them birth, both
types of incentives for the development of
macro-practice fizzled. The slide continued
even as advocates kept promot-ing macrostrategies of intervention (Dunham, 1940;
Gurin, 1971; Lane, 1939; 1930; Ross,
1955; Rothman, 1968; Steiner, 1925;
Woods & Kennedy, 1922).

Changes in the political climate,
fashions in funding for different programs, bureaucratic hierarchies within
service agencies, and the persistence of
an ethos of individualism all converged to
favor the therapeutic style. The 1950s,

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and particularly the McCarthyism that
reigned at the time, had a chilling effect
on reform movements and demands for
fairness. Dissidents were viewed with
suspicion and labeled as anti-American.
The 1960s represented a sharp break
with the repression of the 1950s. But that
notorious decade also generated a
backlash.
The
cultural
revolution
amplified and united a conservative
constituency. The counter-mobilization of
the right could measure its success by
how terms like “liberal,” “civil lib-erties,”
and “left” became codes for symptoms of
decadent,
pathological,
and
selfindulgent inclinations and behavior
(Schram, 1995).
In addition, programs of service delivery
became more dispersed with the growth of
private and for-profit agencies working
under
hard-to-supervise
government
contracts. The sponsorship of social
programs through private foundations and
the
United
Fund
cemented
a
business/corporate alliance that limited the
options of social workers and fragmented
the claims of clients.

Finally, the therapeutic style jibes
with the national culture of individualism (Ellwood, 1988). Americans are not
inclined to search for social reme-dies
in collective, communal approaches.
Even when systemic failures such as
economic recessions occur, the
tendency is to neglect structural
causes and to concentrate on
promoting individual responses, “pluck”
and personal initiative, against all odds.

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MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

The individualist norm evokes two
long-standing beliefs that mesh with
and encourage a therapeutic approach.
People have the capacity to shape
their lives under a variety of
circumstances. Since people have this
capacity, they are responsible for what
happens to them. The role of therapy is
to help individuals discover and
strengthen their capacities, and to
moti-vate
them
to
use
these
endowments to solve their problems.
Given this force field of cultural
prescriptions and organizational conditions, it is easy to see why the appeal
of the justice ethic paled in social work
practice. But we still have to answer
the question as to why the casework/
clinical
practice
perspective
is
considered to be antithetical to the
justice prin-ciple. It is one thing to
account for the popularity of one
approach over the other. It is another to
understand the invidious nature of the
comparison and the enmity between
the approaches.
The professional consensus is that the
goal of social work is to better the life of
the oppressed and the exploited, those
facing barriers to self-fulfill-ment. The
mission of social work is to turn the skills
of the disadvantaged to their own
advantage and, in so doing, to solve or
ameliorate social problems.
Justice practitioners criticize social
workers who approach such problems as
clinicians, and they castigate them for
assuming that clients themselves are the
cause of the problems they experience.
Clinicians,
they
argue,
choose
interventions to improve behavior by
correcting individual shortcomings. A
selective repertoire of interventions is
designed to foster functional, healthy
adaptation. The description is simplified,

of course. Experienced casework-ers are
aware of barriers over which clients have
little control, and they try to lower them,
even if on a case-by-case basis.

Yet even the characteristic social
work approach of dealing with the
“person in the situation” centers rather
myopically on the individual, and his or
her
immediate
environment—the
family, the work setting, and so on.
Another example illustrates the same
point. “Human Behavior and Social
Environment (HBSE),” a course
required in all accredited schools of
social work, emphasizes the first part
of the title, with a subordinate role for
the second (Carter et al., 1994;
Figueira-McDonough, 1998b). Along
similar lines, a recent book proposal on
mental health, prepared by a number
of distinguished social work scholars,
was touted as the ideal text for HBSE.
The fundamental argument of justice
practitioners is that systemic forces
drive social problems. The justice
mission of social work requires nothing
less than that an unjust system be the
target of change. The individual
approach boils down to a version of
blaming the victim that reinforces the
status quo. It is as if, through a kind of
collective hallucination, social work-ers
have dismissed the “social” from their
professional nomenclature. For justice
practitioners, the honest and sensible
methods of intervention, con-sistent
with the principle of justice, include
community organization, and policy
practice and skills such as advocacy,
grassroots organization, collec-tive
protests, and the like.

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Justice as a Value in Social Work

_________ Rescuing a Profession
That Betrayed Its Mission
How valid is the idea that social work
has fallen short of its mission? Specht
and Courtney mount what is probably
the most dramatic attack on the therapeutic strategy. Along with their
criticism, they develop an ambitious
pro-gram for implementing social
justice that hinges on community
organization (Specht, 1990; Specht &
Courtney, 1994).

Specht and Courtney on the
Shortcomings
___________________ of Therapy
as a Social Work Method
Specht and Courtney acknowledge that
the therapeutic turn in education and
practice goes back a long way, having
evolved over the course of the last
century. Their principal concern is the
ongoing love affair of social work with
popular therapies, together with the
growth of clinical work and its transfer
to private practice. The gist of their
criticism is that these techniques fail to
address the structural context within
which social problems emerge. The
massive
investment
of
human
resources in individual treatment is
misplaced and ineffective.
A corollary distortion stems from the
population that therapeutic social work
is likely to reach. The types of therapy
that are deployed fit the anxieties of the
urban middle class rather than the
stresses of the poor. The standard
menu of concerns includes identity
crisis, the pursuit of self-advancement,
and the like. Therapeutic services are
often deliv-ered privately, in a closed-

9

door
setting,
where
interaction
depends on the skill of the therapist.
Evidence for the effectiveness of these
interven-tions has proven to be pretty
thin (Saxton, 1991; Stiles, Shapiro, &
Elliott, 1986).
Specht and Courtney direct their
bitterest attacks at what they call “popular therapies” adopted by practitioners
and taught in many schools of social
work.
Most
of
these
are
psychodynamic approaches associated
with figures like Rogers, Maslow, Perls,
and Pollack. Specht and Courtney
deny that these treatments have
theoretical coherence or research
validity. The therapies, such as they
are, grew out of utopian religious
movements in vogue during the
nineteenth century, and they came
back in fashion under the guise of
motivational/self-realization techniques
during the pop culture years of the
1960s and 1970s.
As Specht and Courtney see it, the
trend in favor of therapeutic interven-tion
and clinical practice goes squarely in the
wrong direction, turning social workers
away from the poor, whom they were
originally supposed to serve. By the
1990s, about one-third of the students
entering schools of social work said they
planned to go into private practice. The
flight from welfare and public services
continued unabated (Abel & McDonnell,
1990).

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MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

Redeeming Social Work
Critics like Specht and Courtney are
aware that social workers distinguish
between casework and psychotherapy.
For caseworkers, personality change is
not the goal, nor is the middle class their
target clientele. The priority is to
understand the client’s problems from a
social interaction perspective, to match
needs with resources. Still, even if the
approach worked for those in poverty, it
would require an unrealistically optimal—
that is, low—ratio of therapists to clients to
deal with the problems of the poor on a
one-to-one
basis.
Logistically
and
financially, the strategy would be
infeasible. In short, it looks like a
prescription for burnout.
The bottom line for Specht and
Courtney is that traditional case-work
scores low on efficiency and social utility.
Social problems have social causes;
hence, a collective response seems
intuitively to be the way to go. At the end
of the day, the focus should not be on the
individual but rather on the process by
which individuals participate in and utilize
collective life.
Child abuse and neglect are cases in
point. The availability of child care ser-vices
in poor neighborhoods, accessible to all
residents and with extensive and flexible
schedules, together with self-help clusters of
parents, would reduce the incidence of
abuse and neglect. Parents would be able to
put children in a safe place during periods of
stress. At the same time, the self-help group
would help them tune in to signs that lead to
a loss of self-control. During periods of tension or depression, access to services would
protect children and allow parents to recover.
While admitting that certain cases might
require individually tar-geted interventions,
Specht and Courtney expect that their

collective approach would drive down abuse
and neglect in poor neighborhoods.

Loosely inspired by the settlement
house movement, the community
proposal differs from it in two ways. The
community center would deliver locally
coordinated public services, and the
purpose would be to foster the active
participation of residents. Social workers
would be central to this pro-ject in
delivering and coordinating services.
Even more importantly, they would be
crucial in facilitating the organization of
grassroots groups and enabling their
participation in the planning and policies
of the community center. All this would
bring social work back to its true mission
of address-ing social problems and
empowering clients.

Critical Commentary
It is easy to see that the spirit of the
Specht and Courtney proposal goes well
with notions of social capital, grounded
civic society, participatory democracy,
inter-organizational synchronization, and
collective
effectiveness
(FigueiraMcDonough, 2001;
Halpern,
1995;
Putnam, 1993a, 1993b). But it has
operational problems. As is often the case
with such proposals, details about the
structure of the community center, interservice coordination, assumptions about
community solidarity, and evidence of
effectiveness of collective intervention are
sketchy. On all these fronts, a variety of
concrete

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Justice as a Value in Social Work

precedents could be explored to move
Specht and Courtney’s ideal model
closer to one that is open to
experimentation.

Gil on Social Determinism and
____________________________
Constructing a Just Society
In the eyes of many, David Gil is the father of radical
social work theory. In
Confronting Injustice and Oppression:
Concepts and Strategies for Social
Workers (1998), Gil brings together his
ideas and proposals for practice.
His point of departure is the observation
that social workers have always been
involved with victims of injustice and
oppression, and they seem to grasp
intuitively and emotionally the meaning of
dehumanizing conditions.

Yet there is also evidence of a lack of
theoretical insight into the causes of
suffering and into the strategies
necessary to transform oppressive
socioeco-nomic and political institutions.
It is Gil’s ambition to construct a theory
of injustice, lay out strategies of social
change for overcoming oppression, and
highlight the implications of both for
social work practice.

Assumptions and Evidence
Gil starts with a pair of assumptions.
First, relations of dominance are not
inevitable expressions of the nature of
groups but the result of choices and
actions. Because they are constructed,
hierarchies can be changed through
movements
for
justice.
Second,
relations of dominance permeate all
spheres of life—the social, economic,
political, and cultural. These hierar-chies

11

condition, as well, the consciousness
and behavior of winners and losers. The
net result favors the maintenance of the
status quo. In sum, unjust societies can
be changed. It is acceptance of the
unjust system that is the major obstacle
to change.
Gil puts together a historical analysis to
support his first point, that rela-tions of
dominance reflect choice rather than the
weight of inevitability. He contrasts
societies, and periods of history, that rank
high in egalitarianism, solidarity, and a fair
distribution of resources with others that
have been wracked by the opposite. While
some of Gil’s grand comparisons are oversimplified, a few corroborate the first
assumption. Societies with excessive
demographic growth, for example, may
encourage emigration, or develop new
public enterprises, or shorten the
workweek in order to encourage a more
equitable distribution of income. In short,
what is built into history is not determinism
but the lesson that social challenges can
be handled in a variety of ways, some
more conducive than others to social
justice.
Gil adopts an organic view of society to
buttress his second assumption about the
pervasiveness of dominance. Not unlike
that of Talcott Parsons’s (1951) vision of
systemic functions, Gil’s perspective
stresses the functional complementarity
and interdependence of institutions.

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MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

Table 1.1

Key Institutions of Social Life

Stewardship (development, management,
control, use, and ownership) of natural and
human-created resources
Organization of work and production
Exchange of products of human work
Distribution of concrete and symbolic
goods and services, and of social, civil,
and political rights and responsibilities
Governance and legitimation
Reproduction, biological and social

Take as an example the restrictions
imposed by patriarchal traditions on property
ownership by women. This particular
injustice spills over into lim-ited access to
employment,
education
and
divorce,
controlled authority over offspring, and
barriers against the right to vote. Exploitation
is typically not confined to a single area; it
crosses over into multiple institutions and
domains.

Types of Change
Long-range change consists of undoing
instances of systemic injustice and putting
just structures in their place. Since key
institutions reinforce one another across
the board, only a complete overhaul can
reverse this vicious circle. The goal seems
extravagant, but Gil musters historical
evidence for such seismic change through
collective resistance to the established
order.
Controlled by elites, agencies of
educational and media socialization give
rise to and reinforce a phenomenon
variously described as hegemony (by
Gramsci) or false consciousness (by
Marx). The process means acceptance by

the oppressed of the ideology that
advances their oppression. This belief is
accompanied by the fear that any
systemic change would make matters
worse. In Gil’s view, a good deal of
missionary work is required to counter-act
ideological submission of this magnitude.
Conversion
necessitates
a
lengthy
mobilization of critical consciousness,
initiated and maintained by social
movements in search of just alternatives.

However it comes about, the success
of total system change would be
measured by the elimination of multiple
inequalities. So, for example,




Natural
and
manufactured
products are treated as a public
trust available on equal terms to
everyone
Work and social protection are
organized to meet individual and
social needs



Products are to be exchanged and
distributed fairly according to needs



Truly
participatory
democracy
exists
Socialization
is
shaped
by
egalitarian values



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Short of systemwide reconstruction,
certain transition policies may be viable.
As intervening steps, their aim is to
alleviate as much suffering as pos-sible.
The basic rule is to fight social oppression
within prevailing cultural and legal
conditions. Supposedly, this will allow for
curbing deprivation, while the struggle for
fundamental transformation proceeds. Gil
treats bring-ing down unemployment as a
prime example of transitional policy.

At the heart of structural inequalities
is exploitation that occurs through the
division of labor. There are huge
inequalities in the prestige and rewards
attributed to different types of work. For
those at the bottom, doing the most
undesirable work, “incentives” range
from wages that keep them in poverty to
threats
of
starvation
from
unemployment.
The appropriate transitional policy is
the elimination of unemployment,
together with fair compensation for work.
This entails participation in the
production of needed goods and
services by all members of society,
depend-ing on their abilities. The
legislature would periodically adjust the
length of work depending on the ratio of
workers to what has to be done.
Productive workfare, when necessary,
would be an option. The most
undesirable work would be rotated
among all.
Employment is a badge of social
membership. Its role in determining selfidentity, shaping the creation of social
wealth, and influencing compensation is
undeniable. In recognition of their
contribution to production and reproduction,
workers
should
receive
adequate wages, health protection, and
child care. Progressive taxation would
be a key mechanism moving toward
such reforms.

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13

The Role of Social Workers
Gil insists that the mandate of social
workers is to promote welfare—that is,
conditions under which people fare well.
So, social workers must under-stand
and
strive
to
overcome
the
sociostructural causes of “ill-fare” by
examining the institutions that uphold
them.
Gil knows full well that there are
contradictory tendencies in social work.
On the one hand, there are the tenets of
human solidarity and mutual help,
empathy for suffering, and the ethical
values of justice. On the other, there is the
need to ensure the strength of the
profession and its organizational via-bility,
even when this means concessions to an
unjust status quo. Navigating these
currents impels social workers toward
dissonant roles:

Control—that is, enforcing dominant norms on the
“undeserving poor”
Adaptation—treating the poor so that they adjust
to their conditions
Reform—carrying out incremental
policies from the top down in the
name of reducing oppression and
injustice
Structural transformation—
spreading critical consciousness by
forming collective movements to root
out injustice

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MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

A justice perspective, according to Gil,
would be consistent with the two latter
imperatives. Reform coincides with Gil’s
notion of transitional, short-term policies,
while
structural
transformation
is
indispensable for long-term change.

Critical Commentary
Injustice is socially determined. There is
little room, in Gil’s world, for individual
causes. Yet systemwide change depends
on individual conversion, and this
conversion in turn depends on the
dedication and zeal of those who possess
critical conscience. Therein lies the catch.
Gil’s vision of an enlight-ened few implies
a cadre-led hierarchy otherwise rejected
by his theory.

Paulo Freire’s (1990) method of
encouraging oppressed people to reflect
on their experience, exchange insights
and feelings with one another, and
imagine their way toward fresh
perspectives on social claims is more
con-sistent with a horizontal democracy
than the “enlightened know best” command structure that Gil flirts with. In
fairness, when he discusses the choice
of means for change, Gil (1998) sounds
a return to a relatively egalitarian
standard of leadership:
If this change of consciousness will
lead to a non-violent or violent
system change, only people
affected by the particular unjust
and oppres-sive realities, rather
than distant supporters and
observers, have a moral right to
decide, for they alone may live or
die with the conse-quences of their
strategic choice. (p. 62)

The call for systemwide overhaul and
long-range change is grandiose and
sketchily
operationalized.
Weighed
down by its own ambition and complexity, the scheme collapses in
abstraction. Nevertheless, despite these
shortcomings, Gil’s presentation of
transitional, short-term tactics remains
an important contribution to policy
practice.

Piven and Cloward on Welfare,
Control, and Disruption
_____________________________
A political scientist, Frances Piven, and
Richard Cloward, a professor of social
work, are widely known in radical social
work circles both as activists and authors.
Mobilization for Youth, a landmark
program of the War on Poverty, was their
brainchild. Together with several Columbia
University colleagues, Piven and Cloward
spearheaded
the
program’s
implementation in New York City. In the
1980s, they initiated a movement that
promoted voting in poor communities. The
history of organized labor in the United
States, the functions of welfare, the
unfolding of poor people’s movements,
and critiques of welfare reforms are
recurrent themes in their work.

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The Failure of the Labor Movement
For Piven and Cloward, the route
toward a fair and more equal society goes
through the power of a labor party,
supported by an active labor move-ment.
They link persistently high and growing
inequality in the United States to the
absence of the first and the weakness of
the second.
Early efforts to unionize were squashed
by powerful industrialists during the second
half of the nineteenth century. Under Franklin
Roosevelt, the union movement gained
some legitimacy, but the strategies promoted
by gov-ernment and adopted by labor
leaders to win health and related benefits
through contracts with employers weakened
the movement and set workers against the
expansion of benefits outside the unions.
This
accommodation
defused
the
development of a militant labor movement in
the European sense.

The political wheeling and dealing of
conservative
administrations—in
particular, the Reagan administration—
further sapped the unions, and globalization quickened the downward course.
Public opinion turned against unions for
putting American businesses at a
disadvantage in the world mar-ket.
Production costs inflated by union
demands were blamed for the migra-tion
of industries abroad. Over the past
decades, union membership has fallen
from its high point in the 1950s to below
20 percent of the workforce. Against this
trajectory, the dream of a working class
democracy in the United States, Piven and
Cloward
(1997)
conclude,
was
unachievable.

Welfare as a Control Mechanism
Among social workers, Regulating the

15

Poor (1971) is probably the best known of
Piven and Cloward’s books. The focus is
on welfare in general and public
assistance in particular. The thesis is that
the purpose of welfare is to control the
working poor, not necessarily to help them
or improve their social position. Piven and
Cloward marshal historical evidence
ranging from the Elizabethan poor laws to
the development of comparable legislation
in the United States. Welfare policy does
not follow a progressive path, responding
in linear fashion to the needs of the poor.
On the contrary, it expands and shrinks
depending on perceived threats to the
status quo. Figure 1.1 gives a schematic
depiction of their model.
The cycle starts with an unequal society,
typical of capitalist systems in which
competition is never fair. Early victories
create differences in resources between
winners and losers. The winners enter
subsequent competitions with accumulated
resources that guarantee future victories or
at least bias outcomes in their favor. With
economic power comes political power, and
so we have a society bifurcated between the
powerful and the powerless.

There is a catch, however. Those in
power need the poor to do the work that
creates wealth. They need docile workers
to maximize production and decrease the
costs of coercion. How can systemic
problems be transformed

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MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

Wel
fare
exp
ans
ion

unrest subsides
fear damage
system

welfare
restriction

unrest
blaming the system
winners

political
influence

welfare
policy
(low benefits,
poor self-blame)

 resources
Competition
− resources

losers

exploited workers

crisis
high unemployment
available
cheap labor

Phase 1

Figure 1.1

Phase 2

Welfare Cycle

into (the illusion of) self-generated
pathologies? The answer is public
assistance. These are programs designed
to alleviate the misery and despair of the
marginalized, by giving them a measure of
insufficient help. Treatment concentrates
on individual dysfunctions that reflect
essentially self-inflicted problems. Tacitly,
blame is shifted from the system to the
person.

Sometimes, when economic crisis

occurs and the number of the marginalized grows, as does their despair, this
comfortable arrangement breaks down.
The self-blame ploy loses plausibility.
Outsiders start to attribute their
predicament
to
the
system’s
shortcomings. Protests, civil disruptions,
and even mass violence follow. To
protect their advantages and the system
that provides them, elites are quick to
make concessions to appease widening discontent.
As the situation returns to what passes for
normal, and the need for cheap labor
continues, rules specifying requirements for
applications for social assis-tance are subtly
and not so subtly adjusted upwards, and
many who were receiving assistance find
themselves expelled from the welfare rolls.
Left

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Justice as a Value in Social Work
without protection, the impoverished cannot
bargain for better wages, and they accept
the pittance offered them. This equilibrium
settles in until the next crisis.

The Depression era in the United
States is a showcase, Piven and Cloward
argue, that confirms their hypothesis.
Social assistance provided by the states
before the 1930s was meager, a fact that
became painfully obvious as soon as the
Depression hit. By the beginning of the
1930s, the Hoover adminis-tration and
Congress were well aware of the misery
spreading across induss-trial centers like
Detroit and agricultural states like
Arkansas.
But
neither
branch
of
government moved to respond to the
emergency. It was the aggres-sive
demands of various groups, disorders in a
few cities, increased agitation by
communist sympathizers, and a march on
Washington by disgruntled World War II
veterans that raised the awareness of the
nation and led to the landslide electoral
victory of Franklin Roosevelt. Fearing
mounting disorder, some farsighted
businessmen backed Roosevelt’s election
and his early social reforms (Gates, 1983).
As the economy slowly recovered,
however, this support withered. Some
workfare programs—the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) was per-haps the
most conspicuous—came in for attack on
the grounds that they constituted
government competition with private
business. So, though high unemployment
persisted for another year, the program
was dismantled.

Social Workers and Strategies of
Disruption
From the perspective of Piven and
Cloward, social workers, as deliverers of
remedial services, are handmaidens of the
status quo. The professional neutrality

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17

professed by social workers is a fake. As
an attempt to reconcile differences
between parties with huge power
discrepancies, neutrality becomes in effect
a political act that favors the mighty. Social
workers should be unequivocally on the
side of the powerless—that is, the poor.

Their research on Poor People’s
Movements (1974) led Piven and
Cloward to conclude that, within the
political system of the United States,
disruptive
collective
action—riots,
protests, civil disobedience, and the like
— constituted the only chance for the
poor to turn social policy in their favor.
These strategies have a chance when
social dislocations make political
realignments likely.
Since the poor are powerless, the only
change strategies available to them are
those of conflict. Powerlessness does not
simply result from a lack of eco-nomic
resources. It is also transmitted through
the treatment the poor receive from
various institutions, including those that
are supposed to help them. Long delays in
receiving service, continuous checks, and
vigilance and suspi-cion are the norm.
These experiences convey to recipients
that they are worth-less, and the feeling
often gets internalized. The extremely low
electoral participation of the poor reflects
an awareness of their lack of power.
Seeing themselves as outsiders, without
access
to
formal
channels,
the
marginalized are left only with “deviant”
forms of asserting their claims.

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MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

So, according to Piven and Cloward,
only spontaneous acts of collective protest
that grab the attention of political parties
when they are going through constituency
realignments can be successful. The
1960s provide an exemplary, best-case
illustration of this scenario. Southern
whites began to abandon the Democratic
Party, and blacks were courted to join up.

Critical Commentary
Piven and Cloward’s stand on welfare
has come in for numerous criticisms. The
core of the programs instituted by
Roosevelt has survived and grown over
time. While ours remains a very unequal
society, the United States is not simply a
land of the very rich and the very poor.
Piven and Cloward dismiss the role of the
middle class and the power of the unions.
Criticisms such as these are reasonable
correctives to a simplistic model. This said,
the theory still alerts us to certain dynamics
and biases that have driven recent changes
in welfare policy in the United States
(Figueira-McDonough

&

Sarri, 2002).
The disruption thesis has been the
target of particularly stringent
criticism. Many observers of social
movements reject exclusive reliance on
disruption as a strategy for success.
One representative of this position, the
sociologist William Gamson (Gamson &
Schmeidler, 1984) cites evidence from
histories of the labor and the civil rights
movements that contradicts Piven and
Cloward’s ideas. These movements
cannot be reduced to sponta-neous,
violent expressions of despair. They
gained real benefits for the poor through
a repertoire of tactics. They managed to
mobilize resources, develop effective

long-term inter-organizational alliances,
and introduce important changes in
social policy.
David Wagner (2000), a radical social
worker, acknowledges some of the
dangers
of
cooptation
that
representatives of welfare clients face.
But his research has also demonstrated
that consumers of assistance have been
effec-tive if they belong to social
movements that give them clout.
In The Other America: Poverty in the
United States, Michael Harrington (1962)
stripped Americans of the fiction of shared
national affluence. His vivid depiction of
poverty, in some places paralleling Third
World con-ditions, fed into a strategy of
reform that did not rely on disruption.
Harrington, a democratic socialist, saw the
poor he had encountered face-to-face as
society’s outsiders. Serious redistribution
was needed to bring them into the
American way of life. He did not believe
that conventional, mostly voluntary
channels of redistribution would work. In a
society prizing individual competition,
insiders would not willingly back
redistribution on such a scale. Harrington
held to the view that only the federal
government had the power to promote the
inclusion of the marginalized. His strategy
was translated into the War on Poverty,
launched during the Kennedy years.
Bypassing state, county, and municipal
authorities, federal grants were channeled directly to poor communities.

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_______________ Gilbert on
Balanced Reform From Within
The reformism of Neil Gilbert (1995)
contrasts dramatically with the radicalism of Gil, and Cloward and Piven.
The inexorable expansion of welfare
alarms him. The solution, he thinks, lies
in transforming the welfare state into an
“enabling” state. In view of an
exponential growth in entitlements, the
aging of the population, and resulting
fiscal pressure, Gilbert looks on some
such
“Third
Way”
reform
as
unavoidable.
Structuralists like Gil define problems
as socially determined, whereas Gilbert
is inclined to attribute them to individual
causes and only tangen-tially to the
vagaries of the market. By and large,
the thesis developed by Gilbert could
stand as a blueprint for Clinton’s 1996
welfare reform.

Excesses of Welfare Expansion
Three factors are behind the growth in
welfare: the aging of the population, the
breakdown of the family, and the sheer
increase in claims on the state. The first
cause is a demographic fact, widely
discussed whenever Social Security reform
is considered. Gilbert’s recommendations
are akin to some of the solu-tions common in
these debates. Raising the retirement age is
one; reducing tax deductions for retirees
whose assets reach a comfortable level is
another.

Gilbert’s views on the second factor—
family collapse—overlap with a proposition
advanced by Charles Murray (1984).
Single motherhood is an indicator of family
breakdown, and welfare encourages this
breakdown. The rapid growth of AFDC
(Aid to Families with Dependent Children)
caseloads in the 1960s, Gilbert admits,

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19

resulted in part from policies that set fairer
admissions criteria. His critique focuses on
how the originally temporary features of
the program took on the characteristics of
a permanent entitle-ment. Social Security
Survivor’s Insurance was supposed, in
time, to protect widows with children. In
Gilbert’s view, had the government kept on
that road, the outcomes for families and
society would have been much better.
Gilbert gives extensive coverage to his
third factor—the increase in claims on the
government. He decries the proliferation of
social rights as a conta-gion promoted by
activists enamored of identity politics.
Trendy zealots fabricate novel categories
of social victims to whom protection is
due. The call for policies to protect the
homeless is one such fashion. Others
include demands to protect abused
children and women who are sexually
assaulted. Gilbert claims that evidence of
these problems is vastly, and deliberately,
inflated to boost the emotional appeal of
calls for reform.

Inefficiencies of Welfare
The decentralization of services, delivered in a maze
of agencies through which benefits, in cash and in kind,
wend their way, has a negative impact

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MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

on the uniformity of criteria and evaluation
of outcomes. Contracting out might lead to
cuts in costs, but the lack of adequate
supervision
jeopardizes
evaluation,
especially with for-profit organization
dealing in human services.

Gilbert cites benefits given to teenage
single mothers as a typical ineffi-ciency.
Teenage girls are in a troubled period of
their lives, and he sees becoming
pregnant as one more sign of
immaturity. “Kids with kids” have
deficient parenting skills. Child abuse
and crib deaths are the predictable
results (Kleinman, 1993). Since teenage
mothers are unusually inept care-takers
of their children, they need to be under
the watch of competent guardians. Teen
mothers should be required to take
parenting classes. Furthermore, they
should go to school or they should work.
If their perfor-mance does not improve,
sending incompetent teen mothers to a
halfway house should be considered.

The Costs and Unfairness of
Wealthfare
Indirect and often invisible transfers
along the lines of tax deductions and
credit subsidies—such as tax credits, tax
deductions on retirement, deductions and
exclusions for housing, credit subsidies
and tax expenditures for education,
training, and employment and social
services—disproportionately benefit the
middle and upper-middle classes. These
benefits cost a lot to the Treasury and
mount up to a serious fiscal burden. Such
expenses—wealth-fare—are equivalent to
welfare. They are social goods, not earned
in market exchange, distributed by the
government.
Mortgage interest deductions and rental

exclusions cost more than twice as much
as direct federal grants for housing and
community development. The value of
child care tax credits is twice as high for
upper than for lower income brackets. The
same happens with job benefits. Highpaying jobs are more likely to include
pension benefits than low-paying jobs.
Taxpayers from the first group gain more
than they should from pension-related tax
deductions. Most transfer payments to the
poor go to immediate consump-tion, while
benefits for the better off tend to contribute
to the accumulation of assets (Sherraden,
1991). In short, indirect and invisible gifts
to the non-poor exacerbate inequalities
created by the market.

The Enabling State and the
Role of Social Workers
As far as Gilbert is concerned, the
welfare state has no choice but to move
away from entitlements toward the
promotion of private responsibility, in the
direction of what he calls the enabling
state. Citizens are to be treated not as
passive recipients of public benefits but as
individuals capable of look-ing after
themselves, with occasional assistance
from the government.
Citizens who embrace American
values, including stable and responsible
family life and hard work, will eventually
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become productive and independent.
Some, because of personal incapacity as
well as (ill-defined) social forces, may be
temporarily or permanently unable to fulfill
the ordinary responsibilities of citizenship.
Training and temporary support, with
incentives and punishments, will push the
more capable toward independence.
Longer periods of service provision, under
strict controls, will achieve the same result
for the less capable.

The objective of welfare is not
redistributive. It is not a means to
reduce social inequalities. Rather, the
goal is to integrate everyone into the
market. The distinctive function of the
market
is
to
foment
economic
development and social integration. This
is the true road to social equity.
The importance of programs like WIN
and other workfare programs for clients
on assistance is that they link recipients’
rights and social responsibility in order
to
achieve
self-sufficiency.
The
assumption of civic responsibilities has
to accompany any expansion of claims
to benefits. These duties include taking
available jobs, contributing to the
support of one’s family, learning enough
in school to be employable, and
respecting the law.

Behavioral Strategies
How do you get collaboration from
people who, for a variety of reasons,
cannot make ends meet and who see
no opportunities to better their lives?
The answer is carrot-and-stick behavior
modification through incentives and
punishment.
Take as a success story of work
incentives the experience of some
AFDC mothers. They left the program by
getting a job, while retaining their
access to Medicaid, food stamps, and

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21

child care benefits for one year, even if
their job income would have disqualified
them from those programs. By the same
token,
punishment,
either
by
withdrawing benefits or increasing
controls, would be meted out for
nonconformity at any level—in family, in
work effort, in training, or in moral
behavior.
On the issue of unemployment,
Gilbert’s position is very close to Mead’s
(1986). Simply put, the unemployed must
accept any job available. The ideal is to
integrate people into the market economy
and to ensure that the unem-ployed
assume their responsibility as productive
citizens.

Table 1.2 lays out the contrast
between the traditional welfare state and
the enabling state. Gilbert (1995) adds
an important qualifier to the imper-ative
of self-sufficiency:
The new policies aim for a fairer
balance between the right to welfare
and the responsibility for selfsufficiency. The danger is that they
will rely too heavily on the
presumption of competence. Owing
to personal incompetence, as well as
to social forces beyond personal
control, some people are temporarily
or permanently unable to support
them-selves
and
meet
the
responsibilities of citizenship. (p. 83)

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MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
Table 1.2

Comparing the Welfare and the Enabling State
Welfare State

Expanding social
rights Relying on
direct expenditures
Transfers in the form
of service Delivery by
public agencies Policy
focused on individuals
Welfare benefits for
consumption Reducing
economic inequality

Linking rights to
obligations Increasing
indirect expenditures
Transfers in cash and
vouchers Delivery by
private agencies Policy
focused on the family
Welfare benefits for
investment Restoring
social equality

Gilbert separates welfare recipients into two groups.
There are those who come to welfare due to some crisis
in their lives, stay for a short time, have reasonable
skills, and enjoy a certain family stability. For this sector,
standard incentives and punishments will work in a
relatively short time. However, the other group might
have a more disorganized past because of drug
addiction, brushes with the law, unstable or nonexistent
family life, or spotty employment. For these individuals,
strategies need to be tailored to their specific problems,
over longer periods. Rehabilitation will depend on
greater control, supervision, and intensive special
services.
The enabling state would leave social workers with two
roles. Some—case managers delivering routine behavior
controls—would be suited to work with the first category of
clients. A significantly greater variety of interventions, some
demanding therapeutic expertise, would be needed for the
second group. The mix of control and therapeutic
interventions has proven to be hard to rec-oncile, as
demonstrated by social work interventions in the criminal
justice system. The scarcity of trained direct-service social
workers in welfare agencies would make assigning different
workers to different roles a nightmare.

Critical Commentary
Gilbert’s concerns about the expansion of welfare
are well taken, and his observations about the

Enabling State

inefficiencies of welfare are justifiable. But his
arguments against new claims are flimsy, and his
views regarding cures for poverty seem forced into a
preconceived framework.
Recall that, in his remarks on the expansion of
claims, Gilbert charges activists with massaging data
in order to elicit support for programs that they have
already decided are desirable. He is very hard on
reported evidence about the sexual abuse of children
and rape. But the counter-evidence he introduces is
just as weak.
This same problem of facile generalization taints his
report on the dan-gers that teen mothers pose to the
welfare of their children. Gilbert cites just one study to
validate his conclusions. He suggests a further link
between

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Justice as a Value in Social Work

assumed abuse by mothers and the
incidence of crib death. Several national
and regional studies have found that
children born to teenage mothers, in part
because of their lack of access to prenatal
care, are often underweight and frail
(Ketterlinus, Henderson, & Lamb, 1990;
Ventura & Martin, 1998). Besides this, we
know that child abuse statistics are
regularly
biased,
reflecting
cultural
construction and class vulnerability. The
personal volatil-ity imputed to teen
mothers has not been found to be
widespread (Horowitz, 1995; Walruff,
2002). The expectation that young
mothers on their own will have a hard time
handling
the
responsibilities
of
motherhood is plausible. But tarring these
girls with unsubstantiated failings leads to
punitive recom-mendations rather than the
support they may need.
Gilbert sings the praises of selfresponsibility and economic integration
through work, but he neglects to mention
how the market itself and the skewed
distribution
of
economic
rewards
contribute to forms of institu-tionalized
inequity that cause poverty. Individual
causation—ineptitude, the wrong values,
and the like—take the front seat.
Strategies of intervention are cast around
an image of the poor as people who do
not quite abide by American standards of
sturdy independence, work ethic, and
family ethos. Behavior modification is
needed to straighten them out. Once
rehabili-tated, the poor will be integrated
into the market and become true—that is,
productive—citizens. Some proposals
along these lines, such as employment
without choice, are hard to distinguish
from those adopted by authoritarian
governments.

________________________ Jordan

23

on Struggling for Justice
The title of Bill Jordan’s (1990) book—
Social Work in an Unjust Society—
captures the tension between the roles
ascribed to social workers and their ethical
commitment to justice. Jordan’s approach
differs from that of radi-cals like Piven and
Cloward who stress the necessity of
working outside and against the system.
But neither does he subscribe to a belief
that the profes-sion’s role is to prop up the
status quo.

The Ethic of Social Justice and
the Roles Assigned to Social Workers
Implicitly or otherwise, most jobs in
social work come with a mission of control.
Social workers are usually given coercive
leverage over their clients. They can
decide that certain requirements for a
benefit have not been met. They can
decide to remove children from their
families. They can decide if a juvenile who
has broken his or her parole should be
sent to an institution.

They can send a runaway child back to
the family. In short, the positions held by
social workers carry the authority to
evaluate the behavior of clients and to
enforce rules.

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MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

Rules supposedly represent a public
morality; they are in place to enforce and
maintain norms. A corollary assumption is
that these goals or values represent the
preferences of a majority. Social workers,
then, find themselves in the position of
enforcers. They can curtail the autonomy of
clients.

The ethical dilemma disappears once
clients are viewed as deviants, unable to
fend for themselves in a rule-bound
manner. But three considera-tions quickly
make this solution much too simplistic.
First, not all rules have moral content.
Second, rules are standardized and
abstract, while the situa-tions that social
workers confront are complex and
idiosyncratic. Last, those involved in
formulating rules are generally not
representatives of a majority.

Moral reasoning is no substitute for
knowledge of the law and social pol-icy.
Yet social workers handle tasks, day to
day, in the field, precisely in sit-uations
where applying laws and policies is
often ambiguous. Specific cases are
open to a number of interpretations.
Improvisation goes on all the time. The
judgment, discretion, and skill of
professionals all come into play to
protect the public interest.
The interests of clients are at stake as
well. Clients may be victims of injus-tices
perpetrated by powerful groups who
dominate decision making and influence
the life chances and opportunities of
clients. These “players” also condition the
power and resources of social workers.
Social worker–client transactions have to
be understood within the ampler context in
which poli-cies originate. Only the
guileless and utterly naïve would suppose
that there is no real clash of interests
between dominant groups, on the one
hand, and the excluded on the other. A

realistic expectation is that social workers
are to act in conformity with rules
formulated by those in charge, and only
secondarily on behalf of the downtrodden.

Contradictions of the LiberalDemocratic System
The freedom and participation of
individuals are ingredients essential to
liberal democracies. This is the norm of
high school civics textbooks. Be this as it
may, Jordan concurs with the argument of
some social justice theorists that there is a
contradiction between property and
personal rights (Bowles & Gintis, 1986).
The accumulation of assets leads to the
control of resources that others might
need. The process gathers momentum. It
allows the few to impose conditions for
access to resources on the many.
Wealthy people, Jordan observes, are
able to shape rules of distribution in their
favor. They have a powerful say in setting
wage and welfare benefit levels. As
employers and landlords of the poor, they
have enormous influence on remuneration
and rents. They can become architects of
economic marginality.

Some variations on the liberal theme
(Bowring, 1843; Mill, 1912) express this
link more clearly. Utilitarians, for example,
assign to government the responsibility for
structuring society so as to maximize
production and opti-mize the distribution of
welfare. The free market remains the best
way to generate the largest possible
income—with the added prescription that
the resulting wealth be channeled to the
whole population in fair proportions.

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Justice as a Value in Social Work

According to Jordan, the democratic
side of liberal polities has serious
fissures, too. Economic disparities
impede access to political power. In
real-ity, the majority principle excludes
sizeable portions of the population.
Political decision making may gain in
efficiency, but at the cost of reducing
outcomes to sheer competition, rather
than consultation, cooperation, and
compromise that are more in tune with
genuine participatory democracy. These
problems are endemic not only in the
selection
of
representatives
and
decision making ostensibly by majority
vote. They also characterize “expert”
policies
formulated
without
the
participation of those affected by them.
When applied to the poor, these
arrangements tend to be paternalis-tic,
shaped “for their own good.”

Challenging the System From Within
Social workers face the dual
challenge of responding to the hereand-now issues of clients and of
evaluating options and strategies for
dealing with the structural origins of
those problems. Rules are not particularly case-sensitive. Besides, the
connection between professional rules
and social goals is often murky and
even
contradictory.
Given
these
parameters,
thought
experiments
require a good deal of ingenuity and
imagination.
Compelled to apply the rules, social
workers nevertheless have some freedom to interpret them. They can
challenge their suitability for achieving
one goal or another. They don’t have to
go by the book. They offer immediate
counsel for the urgent needs of clients,
and they open up access to resources
designed to help them out. At the same

25

time, their professional code speci-fies
that social workers discern and respect
the goals of clients themselves. They
must also attend to the variable
meanings of the problem, and their
possible solution, that may arise out of
the concrete social network in which
clients find themselves.
Building mutual trust and identifying
structural causes that may con-tribute to
the client’s problem are also part of the
social worker’s mission. Consciousnessraising of the latter sort resembles the
strategy recommended by radical social
workers. These efforts cannot be
reduced to after-hours activism. They
are to be carried on within the service
agencies where most social workers do
their work.
The justice-oriented social worker has
two other commitments: to challenge the
rules that hinder his or her clients’ welfare,
and to enhance the active participation of
clients in decisions that affect them. This
entails con-fronting the rules that infringe
on or otherwise undermine publicly stated
moral goals, such as those guaranteeing
civil and human rights.
Similarly, social workers should build on
the solidarity generated by common
experiences and residential sharing in
order to establish community centers
where locals can gain an active voice in
decisions
affecting
them
(FigueiraMcDonough, 2001). Reclaiming a degree
of civic engagement that is a core
expression
of
democratic
values
legitimizes such activities.

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26
MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

Critical Commentary
Jordan’s proposals are more modest
than those of radical theorists. The
objective is not to dismantle the system
but to draw on taken-for-granted principles
—democracy, equal opportunity, civil rights
and human rights—to correct the way the
poor have been exploited, dominated, and
rendered powerless. The approach
sympathizes with the constraints imposed
by social work practice in the trenches,
and it sets forth strategies coherent with
professional
ethics.
But
detailed
suggestions about how to implement such
strategies remain to be specified. Jordan’s
preliminary map, enticing as it is, would
benefit from the incorporation of
experiential results.

Wakefield on Justice as the
Organizing Principle of Social Work
__________________
In an important series of articles,
Jerome Wakefield (1988a, 1988b)
makes a useful distinction between
disciplines and professions. Disciplines
develop knowledge through theory and
research; professions are supposed to
change situations through interventions.
The goal is to solve or prevent
problematic situations. Disciplines are
concerned with intellectual puzzles,
professions
with
problems
and
solutions.
Plainly, professions base their
intervention on knowledge derived from
the theories and research of relevant
disciplines. This borrowing forms a large
part of their intake. But their practical
activities follow from the values and
goals that define their commitment to

change. These are the norms, the
desired outcomes, around which
professions are organized.

Methods Versus Goals
Amid the reams of pages written about
the organizing values of social work, the
most direct statement comes from the
professional codes of the
National Association of Social Workers,
cited at the beginning of this chap-ter. Two
of these principles are central: (a) respect
for the autonomy of the clients, and (b)
contribution to social justice. Wakefield
reiterates that these values are crucial to
the professional identity of social workers.
Methods of intervention, he argues,
have less importance. To prove the point,
he assembles examples of methods that
cut across human service professions. A
typical arsenal of techniques includes
those deployed in family therapy by social
workers, counselors, family therapists, and
clinical
psy-chologists.
The
same
“portability” holds at the macro level.
Methods of community organization used
by social workers and community
developers are pretty much the same. All
these
professionals
base
their
interventions on research conducted by
social scientists. This is the provenance of
constructs

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Justice as a Value in Social Work

like psychological maturation, system
and network linkages, inter-organizational connections, social capital, power
structure, and so on. As knowledge
expands and social contexts change, so
will skills and methods of interven-tion.
Dynamic adaptation of all human
service professions is the only way to
go. Fixing a profession around a
supposed monopoly of intervention
tech-niques
is
impossible
and
undesirable.
What distinguishes professions from one
another, what gives them a unique identity,
are their values or codes. Adherence to and
promotion of these val-ues are part and
parcel of professional life. Success has to be
judged in light of the commitment to the
goals that the methods, whatever they may
be, must advance. The rule applies to all
professions. The goal of mental health
profes-sionals is to promote adjustment
between the internal and external realities of
clients. The methods and skills thought to be
appropriate and productive have changed
greatly—from scalding baths, to talk therapy,
to behavior modifica-tion, to drug therapy.
What is considered canonical one day may
be quackery the next. Through all this, the
remedial goal has not changed.

The Utility of the Concept of Distributive
Justice
How do we put flesh on the abstract
bones of self-determination and justice?
Wakefield builds on Rawls’s theory of
distributive justice. True to its Kantian
roots, the theory presupposes that we are
all rational, and that we should be able to
make decisions toward our own goals.
Rousseau’s notion of groups grounded on
a social contract is also germane. This
compact embodies an elemental trade-off.
Individuals join social units and go along
with their regulations in the belief that the

27

group will be more efficient than scattered
individuals in providing for their needs.
This voluntary submission has a specific
counterpart. It is the expectation that,
downstream, social goods produced by
the group will be distributed among all
members.

Three
principles
determine
distributive justice: (a) freedom—in other
words, the right of all to the most
extensive freedom compatible with comparable freedom for others; (b) equal
opportunity, since economic and social
inequalities can only be tolerated if
positions that create them are open to
all on equal terms; and (c) the difference
principle—that is, social and economic
inequalities are justified if and only if
they function to benefit the least privileged. The principle of freedom accords
well with the social work value of selfdetermination. The other two principles
lie directly in the ambit of social work’s
justice ethic.

Legitimizing Psychotherapy as a
Contribution to Justice
Principles of social justice are conventionally framed
in terms of the dis-tribution of economic goods. At first
glance, the principles of equal oppor-tunity and
difference just mentioned appear to give credence to
observers

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28
MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

who assign priority to community
organization
and
policy
practice,
stressing that these are the strategies
that deal with access to rights and
goods. Wakefield takes issue with this
exclusivity of means. He reasserts the
value of psychotherapy as a method at
the service of justice.
Wakefield develops this idea from
Rawls’s insight that the psychologi-cal
property of self-respect may be the most
primary social good with which justice is
concerned, independent of its economic
implications. We gain self-respect by
seeing ourselves as valued members of
society and by being seen by our peers as
such. Individuals with low economic and
political status are likely to place
themselves and to be positioned by others
at the bottom of the pecking order. Low
self-respect is thus a social construction.
Lack of self-respect constitutes a barrier to
freedom and equal opportunity insofar as
it discourages individuals from pursuing
these goals. Passivity can set in, let-ting
others override legitimate desires and
goals, and distancing those who are
discouraged from the collectivity.

Wakefield extends this understanding
of self-respect as a basic good to other
psychological deficiencies that, he
argues, are also socially created. His
long list takes in a series of negative
traits that result from bad experiences:
low self-esteem, low self-confidence,
low self-awareness, low problem-solving
skills, low assertiveness, low selforganization, low social skills, and low
emo-tional intelligence.
If social workers help individuals
overcome problems in these areas and
enable clients to pursue their goals by
directing them toward opportunities, they are
contributing to distributive justice. This is
because justice so defined is nothing more

than the distribution of socially created
goods. Injustice, then, consists of social
impediments in the way of reaching these
goods. Justice-oriented therapists, in striving
to remove or circumvent socially cre-ated
psychological impediments, make a valuable
contribution. By way of example, consider
restrictions on the developmental needs of
children. These may be
biological,
nutritional, or psychological, and they may
be traced to the family situation, the
surrounding
environment,
or
some
combination of both. Handicaps like these
are attributable to failures of the social
structure. The role of the psychotherapist is
to foster viable personal development.

Obviously, policy advocacy and
community practice are needed to
redress some environmental and
systemic conditions. Equal access to
quality education is one such structural
issue. If we are to live up to the equal
oppor-tunity
principle,
it
is
the
institutional distortions of the education
system that need fixing.

Critical Commentary
Wakefield’s distinction between goals
and methods is a helpful insight for
social workers. So is his treatment of
self-respect as a socially created
phenomenon. The same goes for his
depiction of psychotherapy as a justiceenhancing intervention.

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Justice as a Value in Social Work

Although Rawls’s theory sets aside
defects of nature because they do not
meet his criteria of being socially
created, we are becoming increasingly
aware that many health problems are
not matters of fate or bad luck. They are
socially
constructed.
Polluted
environments
foster
diseases.
Insufficient food stunts growth and
learning. Differential access to health
services short-ens the life of the least
privileged. Lack of prenatal care affects
what might otherwise be thought of as
natural differences—for example, in
intelligence. The market structure of
health services in the United States
leaves about 40 to 70 million citizens
without
health
insurance.
This
constitutes
a
glaring
failure
of
distributive justice, but it is one that
Wakefield’s model fails to address.
As a kind of afterthought, Wakefield
makes allowances for clinical social
workers who use their skills for other
than justice objectives. The popularity of
such specializations and the appeal of
private practice are such that their place
in the profession becomes justified. It is
a mystery how this conclusion can be
squared with the argument that values
and goals, rather than meth-ods and
skills, organize and define a profession.

__________ Comparing Concepts of
Justice in Social Work
The approaches we have examined treat
social justice in markedly different ways,
ranging from an ideal of equalization, to a
social democratic order dominated by
labor, to a liberal economic integration of
responsible citizens under a free market.
We have also looked at a couple of
models that are less concerned with
visionary goals, focusing instead on how

29

to
improve
existing
systems
by
challenging unfair policies or ensuring
access to basic goods.

The more ambitious the justice
model, the more sweeping the change
goals and the more demanding the
strategies recommended. The roles laid
out for social workers in the creation of
an egalitarian society are very farreaching indeed. In contrast, by the
standards of the labor socialism advocated by Cloward and Piven, social
workers are dismissed as pernicious
agents of the powerful.
Jordan’s proposals require a complex
response from practitioners. Social
workers must assess the legitimacy of
policies they implement, and they must
empower their clients and protect their
rights. Wakefield takes still another tack.
By promoting goals over methods, he
unifies the roles of social work-ers
around the promotion of any activities
that reduce injustice in the distri-bution
of socially created resources.
Table 1.3 summarizes these diverse
perspectives. It sorts out the authors’
conceptualizations of what makes for a
just and unjust society, outlines the
changes and strategies proposed, and
highlights the tasks assigned to social
workers.

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30
Table 1.3

MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
Conceptualizations of Justice in Social Work
Features of a
just society

Gil

Page 30

Production
of public
goods for
distribution
based on
needs
Participatory
democracy

Piven &
Labor
Cloward
socialism: a
society
shaped by
labor to
represent
interests of
labor

Features of an
unjust society

Objectives
for change

Strategies

Roles of
social workers

Systemwide
inequality
Status quo
ideology

Long-range:
elimination of
inequality
Short-term:
universal
access to
employment

Fight mass “false Positive:
consciousness”
responsive to
Build just society
victims of
through
injustice
consensus or
Negative: lack
revolution
analytical and
strategic
knowledge of
roots of social
problems

Any capitalist
system
serving
interests of
capital and
exploiting
workers

Promote
democracy
with labor
participation
Abolish
welfare
system that
controls poor

Desirable:
Handmaidens of
sustain the
the status quo
labor movement Controllers
Realistic: use
of the poor
disruption
during political
realignment

Gilbert

Integrates
Weakens
Move toward
Short-term help
Manage behavior
citizens in
citizens’
enabling state Accountability of
conditioning
the
responsibility
that promotes
outcomes
Tailor
economy,
by unfair,
individual
through positive
interventions
requires
inefficient
economic
and negative
in cases of
social
handouts
development
reinforcement
social
participation
and
handicaps
responsibility

Jordan

Social policies
reflect
interests
of the
powerless

Wakefield

Based on
Fails to provide Promote access Professional
distributive
access to
to basic
methods that
justice
basic goods
goods (e.g.,
use any
All have access
consistent
food, shelter,
effective
to socially
with level of
education,
technique to
produced
development
health)
promote justice
basic goods

Policies made
by and
favoring the
powerful

Participation
Reform from
Interpret
of the
within:
adjustment of
powerless in
challenge
rules to cases
decisions that
morality of rules Challenge rules
affect them
and policies
that harm
Uphold civil and
clients
human rights
Organize clients
for civic action
Increase
distributive
justice through
interventions
Promote
self-respect as
socially
constructed
basic good