Casework Theory

Abstract

The following brief history of social casework theory is intended to introduce some of the more influential ideas that have informed social work practice over the years. More than this, it seeks to clarify the reasons why social work should have attracted so much criticism from radical writers and to identify the problems in previous theorising that our model seeks to address. The list of theoretical approaches is not exhaustive, nor is it strictly chronological. No discipline proceeds in an orderly fashion from one paradigm to the next. Indeed, it could be argued that the divisions between approaches are somewhat artificial; as we shall see, the social work literature displays a penchant for incorporating ideas from multiple sources, making it difficult to assign some authors to one camp or the other. The review has been divided into ‘pre-generalist’ and ‘generalist’ eras because it is fair to say that a discontinuous shift in theorising occurred in the 1970s when caseworkers began searching for common ground with their social work colleagues from other fields. However, even a cursory glance at the dates of the publications cited will demonstrate that pre-generalist approaches continue to attract adherents today.