Week 8

I think the speech by Abraham Flexner in 1915 regarding Social Work as a profession is very intriguing. I'm always fascinated by how opinions can change based on the current political and social climate. I looked up the whole speech online and Flexner concluded that social work is not a profession because it does not have clear cut boundaries and it collaborates with other fields in a way that most professions do not. He also says that social work is in touch with many professions, even though it is not a profession in and of itself. Flexner was careful to say that he didn't think that social work was useless, but he thought that social work needed to abandon social reform and focus more on research. Since Flexner's speech (though I doubt because of it), I do think that social work has started to focus at least a bit more on research, but without abandoning social reform. I doubt that we are focusing on research as much as Flexner would have liked, but I also don't think that we need to abandon social reform to do so. Of course, today Social Work is pretty widely accepted as a profession. The breadth of Social Work, which Flexner critiqued as a reason that it was not a profession, is the very reason that I think social work has reached "profession" status. The definition of a profession, per google, is a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification. Perhaps back in 1915, Flexner could allow himself to believe that Social Work did not required prolonged training, but I doubt he would be able to say that now with the amount of training that we receive.
   I also think it's interesting that this attack on Social Work had a very gendered approach. Social work was (and generally still is) seen as "women's work". To make social work a profession, then, it needed science, which could be seen as a masculine trait. While I agree that having some sort of scientific evidence is important (we need to make sure we aren't harming our clients, after all), I don't believe that research was needed in order for social work to be considered a profession.  This speech was clearly a product of its time, though, and I think it's important to remember that. I really do wonder what Flexner would think of social work now - are we a profession in his eyes now? Since we still focus so much on social reform and our boundaries are more flexible than ever, I think that he would still be wary to call us a profession, even though we do focus more on research now.