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46 Int'l Soc. Work 5 (2003)

handle is hein.journals/intsocwk46 and id is 1 raw text is: 

International Social Work 46(1): 5-6p

Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
0020-8728[200301]46:1;5-6; 031922



Editorial




One  theme that has long been of interest to me is the tendency we
seem  to have as a profession to berate ourselves over and over
again because we  have not as yet solved all the problems of the
world and of the individuals of whom it is comprised. In so doing,
we are forgetting that this is the reality for all professions in our
ever-shrinking, yet ever-expanding universe as all disciplines, includ-
ing ourselves, grow  to understand  the complexities and  inter-
influencing qualities of all systems. (Halmi discusses the implications
of this reality in his important article on chaos theory in this edition.)
And  we fail to rejoice in the tremendous progress we have made in
the last century, a progress that reminds us of the immensity of
our challenges.
  Three separate, yet for me, interconnecting events in the last few
days reminded me  of the broad scope of progress of our profession,
but in a manner that humbly acknowledges how much there is to do.
The first is the group of articles in this edition, which I have just re-
read in the process of the final editing. Each article addresses critical
issues that reflect our maturation and accomplishments. These range
from the ethical challenges faced in practice, to the inevitable large
system tensions between social policies, the world of practice and
the university. We seem to minimize the significance of the privileges
the world has granted us, of inviting a large number of our profes-
sion to bask in the halls of many of the world's great universities
where we  are paid to ask and research the important questions of
the profession. (As an academic who has spent some  five decades
in urging our profession to do more research, I smiled to note in
one of our articles that one such question being raised is whether
we now  do  too much  research.) Another article asks whether we
are doing enough to respond to the vast incidents of human need
that seem to be almost a daily occurrence in our world. A further
article referred to above presents an important discussion of the
implications of a newly emerging  body  of theory that helps us,
and indeed other professions, to shed yet another new light on the

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