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21 J. Soc. & Soc. Welfare 53 (1994)
The Elusive Boundaries of Social Work

handle is hein.journals/jrlsasw21 and id is 411 raw text is: The Elusive Boundaries of Social Work ARNON A. BAR-ON University of Hong Kong Repeated attempts to conceptualize social work have assumed that social work should and can have a precisely defined domain. One suggestion is to equate social work with personal social services. This article suggests that the uniqueness of social work lies in the very absence of defined boundaries. Implications for social work practice are identified, in par- ticular social work's heavy dependence on resource controllers, and the consequent need of social work education to shift its traditional focus from client-centered interventions to managing non-client interactions. The purpose of this article is to narrow the range of defi- nitions of what social work is about. It examines social work's role in the division of labor and the resources its practitioners control, and demonstrates that the function of social work is clearly different from that of the personal social services. This, in turn, enables us to extrapolate the specific roles social work- ers are required to perform, and to examine what implications they have for social work education. The major conclusion of the analysis is that social work is a residual institution with bound- ariless areas of concern, which, paradoxically, requires that so- cial work agencies command no material resources other than labor. Consequently, social workers must meet most of their charge indirectly, mainly by brokerage and advocacy. This also suggests that social work education must lessen its focus on client-centered interventions in favor of teaching practitioners how to work with other, non-client, resource controllers. Introduction During the last thirty years, the distinction between social work and personal social services has slowly eroded, leaving many to wonder whether social work can sustain an indepen- dent identity, and, if so, what this identity should be. One answer to this question is to subsume personal social services

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