Review Of Abraham Flexner's Is Social Work A Profession?

Foundations of the Welfare State
Reflection Paper 4:
Is Social Work a Profession?
Abraham Flexner
University of Pittsburgh
Tutu Wreh

In the research, “Is Social Work a Profession,” author Abraham Flexner announced that social work was not a profession yet. Flexner examines established professions such as medicine, law, and engineering. He states that these professions, unlike social work, have a clear line of professional boundaries and an explicit end. Flexner suggests that social work includes aspect of many fields and has no ending to its work. Throughout the reading, social work is discussed as a group of technical specialties (occupation) and profession is defined as: empirically (as opposed to philosophically)

The discipline of social work, although had been around for a sometime, was still emerging its professionalism. Social workers, as friendly visitors within the scientific charity organizations, had no professional boundaries as they investigated why clients’ were poor or needed aid. On the other hand, indiscriminative relief through the Salvation Army displaced no ethics, principle or process as to when or how to support and aid were to be distributed. The practice of social work was demonstrated through altruistic volunteers with common passions and their activeness in communities, yet they lacked adequate competence through relevant, efficient and effective training for workers and coherent purpose for organizations. Through class literature, we learned how the social work purpose was fostered by conflicting social welfare perspectives in previous centuries. As Flexner passively argues, social welfare laws, and social work organizations and procedures were never firmly rooted into a practice orientation or fully explored into a broad-based theoretical field and for that professionalism was not established. On the other hand, looking at Flexner’s definition of professionalism, I disagree that social work was not a profession. Flexner’s definite in purpose of a profession, he claimed that it must serve a unique function in society, not confine itself to a single practical aim. Social work’s mission enhanced their unique commitment to public service and allowed holistic practices that aim to solve different social issues. Flexner’s research acknowledges social work’s commitment to the public, yet neglects the different purposes of social work and its varieties of concrete