My Definition of Social Work: for the Completeness of Society, in the Sense of Person-in-Environment

Sometimes I wonder how can I introduce the main theme of social work while I have my obligation as a social worker in a family centre to let visitors recognize what I am doing for. From my three years' social work master training, pressed programme structure and practicum made me skip some basic concepts related to the helping profession, which carry significance of the work and understanding of human nature. These days I am studying some fundamental readings of social work to trace back my skipped gaps of my incomplete recognition, which intrigued my reflection over the thinking of the core concept: what is social work? This question is not an easy one, just as many other definitions from diverse knowledge in the world. I still feel perplexed and uneasy against the elusive perception of my social work studies that it is unacceptable to be a social worker of being not able to tell anyone about the exact signification.

There are diverse explanations related to social work. However, I am not satisfied to them that those explanations do not hit the root of social work, in which those just describe the methods and phenomena related to social work.

After conceiving for a few days, I found that the term "social work" is the term denoted itself the most significant meaning of the subject. "Social work" is the work for "social" or "society", which "social / society" has its strong implication of the work a social worker doing for.

Definitely, social work is the work for society. Yet, what is the difference of it from the other professions and professionals while any of them is also for the betterment of society.

"Social work" is the work playing the most attention on societies. No other professions and professionals put more social emphases than social workers. For example, accountants concern financial statement and company situation. Doctors concern health, illness prevention and body structure in biological aspect. Yet, social workers concern the relationship between societal members and society. From this, I built my own definition of social work:

"Social work is the work for the completeness of society, in the sense of person-in-environment, or, concerning the interaction between human being and society. It denotes the pursuit of a list of technical social conception including social functioning, helping, well-being, social welfare to social needs, social policy against social problems, human relationship, problem-solving and counselling."

I use the word "completeness" because it has the most inclusive power covering the broad array of social work concepts and practices as quoted above. The completeness of society is the ultimate goal of social work. Incompleteness means problems existed, in which conflict, row, battering and injustice make society into fragments, while social workers have their mission to find resolutions to sweep the gaps and uphold the society as a society in the nature of reciprocity. In other words, social workers aspire "complete and flawless" society which is the subject of a list of positive interactions between individuals (human relationships), and these interactions and relationship are always in the form of collectively mutual organization to tackle material and objective difficulties. Therefore, social work is always inclined to family, friendship, kinship, counselling, and other forms of human relationship including in political and economic aspects.

This is my foothold of being a social worker. After that, my any social work practice is fulfilled with concrete vision and direction that I know what I should do, that is any practice I do is for the society completeness in considering of the nature of person-in-situation. I think each social worker should process such thinking stage to consolidated helping spirit, otherwise that, the degeneration of social work profession stands to reason for the lost confusion from the profession core.