BiblioVault - Books about Social case work

Looking Back to See Ahead

Helen Harris Perlman

University of Chicago Press, 1989

In over sixty years of involvement in social work—as practitioner, supervisor, teacher, consultant, and author—Helen Harris Perlman has become all but a legend. She has served on national policy committees, lectured around the world, and participated in pioneering social work programs and research. Her wide-ranging experiences enrich her vision of the social work profession: typically she is able to see the forest and the trees. Grounded in psychodynamic and social theory, lucid, forthright, and compassionate, her writings serve to inspire and guide experienced practitioners, teachers, and present-day students.

Looking Back to See Ahead offers pieces chosen for their centrality to Perlman's thinking on some of the major problems of social work practice and education. To each essay she has added her current, informal comments. Refreshingly original is the section "After Hours," in which she captures, in sketches and verse, the humor and heartache that are inevitable in any profession that deals with hurt and troubled people.

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Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse

Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain

Mark Peel

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Social workers produced thousands of case files about the poor during the interwar years. Analyzing almost two thousand such case files and traveling from Boston, Minneapolis, and Portland to London and Melbourne, Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse is a pioneering comparative study that examines how these stories of poverty were narrated and reshaped by ethnic diversity, economic crisis, and war.

Probing the similarities and differences in the ways Americans, Australians, and Britons understood and responded to poverty, Mark Peel draws a picture of social work that is based in the sometimes fraught encounters between the poor and their interpreters. He uses dramatization to bring these encounters to life—joining Miss Cutler and that resurrected horse are Miss Lindstrom and the fried potatoes and Mr. O’Neil and the seductive client—and to give these people a voice. Adding new dimensions to the study of charity and social work, this book is essential to understanding and tackling poverty in the twenty-first century.

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The New Welfare Bureaucrats

Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform

Celeste Watkins-Hayes

University of Chicago Press, 2009

As the recession worsens, more and more Americans must turn to welfare to make ends meet. Once inside the agency, the newly jobless will face a bureaucracy that has undergone massive change since the advent of welfare reform in 1996. A behind-the-scenes look at bureaucracy’s human face, The New Welfare Bureaucrats is a compelling study of welfare officers and how they navigate the increasingly tangled political and emotional terrain of their jobs.

Celeste Watkins-Hayes here reveals how welfare reform engendered a shift in focus for caseworkers from simply providing monetary aid to the much more complex process of helping recipients find work. Now both more intimately involved in their clients’ lives and wielding greater power over their well-being, welfare officers’ racial, class, and professional identities have become increasingly important factors in their work. Based on the author’s extensive fieldwork in two very different communities in the northeast, The New Welfare Bureaucrats is a boon to anyone looking to understand the impact of the institutional and policy changes wrought by welfare reform as well as the subtle social dynamics that shape the way welfare is meted out at the individual level.

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Relationship

The Heart of Helping People

Helen Harris Perlman

University of Chicago Press, 1979

"Like the subject about which she writes, Perlman engages the reader immediately, permitting a view into the author's rich and varied experiences, threaded throughout with profound compassion for all those who seek, suffer, and strive. . . . [This is] a welcome and wise effort, written with grace, sense and deep humanism. Were it in my power I would make it mandatory reading for all those who seek to offer others help."—Shirley Cooper, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry

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Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women

Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work

Karen W. Tice

University of Illinois Press, 1998

Writing case records was central to the professionalization of social work, a task that by its very nature "created clients, authorities, problems, and solutions." In Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women, Karen W. Tice argues that when early social workers wrote about their clients they transformed individual biographies into professional representations. Because the social workers were attuned to the intricacies of language, case records became focal points for debates on science, art, representation, objectivity, realism, and gender in public charity and reform. Tice uses 150 case records of early practitioners from a number of reform organizations and considers myriad books on the specifics of case recording to analyze the competing models of record-keeping, both in the field and outside it.

"An original and important study, this is the first major work I know of to carry out a contextual analysis of case records and to discuss the role case records have played in the development of social work." -- Leslie Leighninger, author of Social Work, Social Welfare, and American Society

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