Repositório RCAAP

This research consists of an exploratory study that intends to instigate and constitute a reflection on the promotional factors of inclusion trajectories next to youngsters with risk paths and, by this means, to understand which capitals are brought by social interventions throughout young people pathways. It aims at the constitution of an analysis base for professional practices. Thus, this work intends to bring a concrete contribution in the scope of Social Work intervention.

This communication essays a critical reflection on Social Work research in Portugal, reporting the status and scope of the knowledge produced in this field. It is based on the master’s dissertations and doctoral theses produced in the post-graduate qualification in Social Work developed in Portuguese universities and some foreigners from 1990 to 2003. Among the possible lines of analysis on the existing production, the paper aims to reflect on the implicit agenda of Social Work research in Portugal and its relevance to the production of a disciplinary knowledge. Will be explored lines of analysis in a comparative perspective with European and international contexts. Complementary to the realized retrospective, will be essay to contribute to build a significant research agenda for the academic and scientific development of Social Work in the context of Portuguese society. This communication takes up and develops a preliminary work of 2003.

In this paper various attempts of studying and comparing social work in different countries are discussed and evaluated. Three main ways of making comparisons are identified: comparisons based on models of social policy, profession-oriented comparisons, and practice-oriented comparisons. Each of the three approaches captures essential aspects of similarities and differences in social work, but they all have obvious limitations as well.

Social work has undergone rapid development over the fifty years since Greenwood classified it as a semi-profession. In this article, social work’s claim to be a profession is examined. It is examined in the light of ideas about what it means to be a profession; the development of theory and internationally recognised ethical principles; and reflection on the complexity of the social work role in both national and global contexts.

The article will present the state of social work in Italy, considering both the education and the profession. The aim is to describe the Italian situation by discussing some peculiar aspects and some criticisms

This text approaches the evolution and development of the Social Work as discipline and profession in Spain. After a brief historical review that frames the current situation we approach the professional group, demographic characteristics and professional activities. The knowledge of the Spanish social workers training and their scientific production completes the X-ray photography of the current situation of the profession.

The article focuses on the social work profession in Portugal. It presents a historical overview of the evolution of Social Work profession in our country and a general profile of the profession. Another purpose is to analyse the main features and the power of this group as a historical profession in the social field. Following the proposal of Weiss & Welbourn (2007), the analysis developed combines an approach based on «attributes» of occupations («attributes approach») and an approach that conceives the professions in terms of «power» («power approach»). The main objective of this paper is, using a similar analitical perspective to Weiss & Welbourn, to support and enhance the comparative analysis of this profession, both as in a more general level of international comparison, as in the specific context of Southern Europe, which our country is part (cross-national analysis).

This article has as starting point the challenges that the social and urban question puts in terms of processes of socio-territorial intervention, and the construction of collective action that is nowadays an intrinsic requirement of the administration of territorial public policies. However, the construction of collective action reveals to be an unstable field, where the mobilisation of actors is not innate, not emerge automatically, and requires the ability to uncover the rationality and logics of action of the actors involved, as well as the tensions and contradictions that are established and developed in that processes.

This article makes an incursion into the possibility of applying the biographical gender to the historical study of Social Work. After mapping the (few) works produced using this historiographical approach, we take care to present some distinctive features of the biographical genre at the historical disciplinary field, and to analyze its latest trends, mainly: the interest in “ordinary biography”; the relationship between the individual trajectory and the broader context in which it unfolds; and the seizure of several existence dimensions from the biographee. Proceeds the formulation of a concrete hypothesis to apply the biographical gender to the study of Portuguese Social Work history: the understanding of the biographical journey of Marie-Thérèse Lévêque, in its articulation with the Lisbon Social Work Institute (1935-44).

The evolution of the Welfare State and social work were deeply dependent during the period of economic growth and social progress, which followed the Second World War until the middle of the years 1970. The mandate of social work is then to assume one part of the emancipatory role and protector of the State in the direction of categories of the population, which for various reasons, suffer from a deficit of integration. Today this synergy seems to be demolished. The social intervenors are solicited by the new publics, which main problems holds less with one personal deficit than with impossibility of occupying a stable place in the society because of social and economic conjuncture. Meanwhile, Welfare State has lost much of its power to assure, on the basis of protected employment, the social integration of the vast majority of the population. Faced with these new challenges, work social is expanded and recomposed (cf. the insertion policies and the local development policies). At the same time, Welfare State seeks, through decentralization and measures d «activation of the passive expenditure», the means to be more soft, more flexible, more close to the interests of users and of the specificity of local situations. You must be attentive to the perspectives that this kind of development could promote. But we must also highlight the ambiguities that it involves, if this is true that it risk to leave the most vulnerable individuals face the hegemony of local authorities. What whether they can be in the future, the transformation of the Welfare State and social work should to continue to register the social interventions within the framework of the exercise of a right guaranteed by the public power.

In this article we will analyse the changes which are observed in the field of the policy social, in particular in the social contract of the assistance in poverty. We will present some lines of tendence which put out the passage of a regime of compassion towards a regime of culpabilisation of the poor in Europe.

In this article we will analyze the great transformation of the conceptions and mechanisms of social solidarity that there is place in present times. We will underline here, shortly, the gestures which reorientate the social intervention and transform social work considerably: the passage of insertion to activation, the constitution of the proximity as basic principle and the accompaniment as a core device of the social policies facing the crisis of the classical model of social integration.

This article aims to reflect on the process of supervision in social work, considering its importance to the professional and personal development. Questions the meaning of supervision in social work, the objectives and types of existing supervision. Reflects on the various models of supervision and asked what the most appropriate model when speaking of practice (praxis) of social work professionals in a given context. Continues, elaborating a supervision proposal based on an integrated eco / holistic model promoter of a critical and reflective. It ends with an exploratory study of social work professionals on the perception of the supervisory process, questioning whether it is possible, through it, to build new forms of action taking into account the context, families, clients, organizations and professionals, the principles and values involved. They consider that the methodology of integrated supervision has been devalued at the expense of a bureaucratic supervision and identify some supervision arrangements that would like to experience in order to improve professional practice.

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The figure of M. E. Richmond is fundamental in the history of Social Work, a history that must be recovered, and even build and know, to move toward consolidation of the profession. There is no individual and collective identity ignoring its own history. All disciplines recognize its pioneers, its classics but in Social Work by some or other reasons, it is contempt his work or herself was placed in an inappropriate way. This article discusses the major allegations made against Mary Richmond (assistancism, functionalism, darwinism), in an attempt to put it best, linked to the philosophical Pragmatism and Interactionism and with the hope that new generations to reach feel proud heirs of one of those admirable women who invented the Social Work.

Mary E. Richmond (1861-1928) helped to create the profession of social work during a unique era of progressive reform in American culture. At the end of her life, the First International Conference of Social Work, held in Paris, represented a movement—which continues today—to develop and coordinate social work practices in nations around the world. This article reviews Richmond’s specific contributions to social work in her own cultural and historical context, considers select examples of her international influence in the 20th century, and argues for her continued relevance in the 21st century global context. I argue that Richmond’s central contribution was a “civic” conception of social work. This conception remains important and necessary today, as social workers respond to new global challenges, cultural and religious diversity, and an emphasis on human rights.

The birthday of Mary Richmond is the opportunity to question about the range of its work and its contributions to the profession and the discipline of social work. An examination of various academic information sources shows that it acquired a great notoriety, but that its contributions are not well known. Beyond of an opposition to Jane Addams and the development of a more rational approach of the social problems, the authors who spoke about its work expressed little information about the complexity of its thought. Since about fifteen years, following new contributions, we see appearing a more complex portrait of the thought of Richmond; the appropriation by the professional and academic fields of its work should provide elements of reflection to approach the challenges of contemporary social work.

In this paper, attention is focused on the work of Richmond What is Social Case Work? that contains elements that could prove the existence of a tradition of research in social work and the persistence of factors still considered critical at theoretical and operational level. Among these are considered: the process of theoretical construction of social work, the enhancement of the potential and resources, the principle of personalization as the foundation of a democratic process support and the simultaneous attention to the citizen in his subjectivity, but also to its environment as well as institutional and organizational structure in which social workers carry out their activities, thereby making reference optic trifocal that characterizes the Italian social work.

In the 150th anniversary of the birth of Jane Addams and Mary Richmond this article aims to rescue the present relevance of their work and thought. Based on the notion of «sociatry», introduced by Richmond, the paper revisits the paths of the founding of two traditions in Social Work, with recurrence erected as irreconcilable, explore the convergences in their thought and action and pointed out the possibilities of its successful articulation in the current societal context and Social Work intervention.

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