The Group As The Unit of Social Work Practice
A common conceptualization of the small group drawn from the social work literature is as
“a social system consisting of two or more persons who stand in status and role relationships with one another and possessing a set of norms or values which regulate the attitudes and behaviors of the individual members in matters of consequence to the group. A group is a statement of relationship among person. Therefore, social systems have structure and some degree of stability, interaction, reciprocity, interdependence and group bond. Open social systems do not exist in a vacuum; they are part of and transact with… their surroundings….” (Klein, 1972, pp.125-126).
For Schwartz (1971), the group was most simply, “a collection of people who need each other in order to work on certain common tasks, in an agency hospitable to those tasks” (p. 7):)
Read more about this topic: Social Work With Groups
Famous quotes containing the words group, unit, social, work and/or practice:
“Belonging to a group can provide the child with a variety of resources that an individual friendship often cannot—a sense of collective participation, experience with organizational roles, and group support in the enterprise of growing up. Groups also pose for the child some of the most acute problems of social life—of inclusion and exclusion, conformity and independence.”
—Zick Rubin (20th century)
“During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“Henry David Thoreau, who never earned much of a living or sustained a relationship with any woman that wasn’t brotherly—who lived mostly under his parents’ roof ... who advocated one day’s work and six days “off” as the weekly round and was considered a bit of a fool in his hometown ... is probably the American writer who tells us best how to live comfortably with our most constant companion, ourselves.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“Nonwhite and working-class women, if they are ever to identify with the organized women’s movement, must see their own diverse experiences reflected in the practice and policy statements of these predominantly white middle-class groups.”
—Kimberly Crenshaw (b. 1959)