On Caring
In On Caring | The Project (see blog Project), we look at what we’re calling modes of caring, the modes necessary to move us from limited understandings of the common good and welfare toward a society that cares: See our modes of caring. In our blog posts and podcasts, we are writing about and visiting with a range of scholars who work on caring and the caring professions: Virginia Held, a philosopher, who writes about the ethics of caring; Nancy Fraser, also a philosopher, who writes about caring and recognition; Andrew Sayer, a sociologist, who writes about caring and concern; Philip Gomberg, an economist, who writes on caring and justice; David P. Levine who examines ethics, government and caring, and many social workers who have taken up these ideas and used them to deepen our understanding of caring practices.
Many have written about the caring professions and much of this work has been done by sociologists and historians (Epstein, 1992; Heite, 2012; Kunzel, 1995; Olson, 2007; Tice, 1998; Wenocur & Reisch,1983); below we’ll consider just a handful of the most important and early contributors to how caring relates to the professions and how professional caring developed over time and was eventually legitimized by individual U.S. States with formal codes and procedures and licensure (this process is called professionalization). While there is a national exam for the LSW and LCSW (ASWB), there are otherwise no national standards: each state has different standards and codes for licensure. This is not true in many places around the world. For example, in much of Europe social workers (e.g., Spain and Portugal) are not licensed: there are no professional exams or examining boards. In Spain, 90% of all social workers are public servants (i.e., employed by the state). They take the same exam required of all civil servants. In Italy social workers must take a specific social work exam (see Hugman, 1996, for discussion of professionalization of social work worldwide). In the United States, the work of caring and social work underwent an early process of state legitimation and professionalization and while it is necessary to attain a license for some forms of practice not all practice requires a license.
Here we must note that we’re not considering the important distinctions between ‘social care’, and social work; social care is a conceptual and practice vocabulary not widely recognized outside of the United Kingdom; elsewhere ‘social work’ is the language used to describe a wide array of caring practices (e.g., psychotherapy, case management, community organizing, advocacy, policy…). There are no ‘clinical social workers in Europe (only in the United Kingdom). In a future post we will look at the important lexical and practical distinctions between social care and social work. Also in a future post we’ll be looking at those who consider the relationship between concern and caring; in particular, we’re interested in the work of Andrew Sayer and those who use D.W. Winnicott to talk about our capacity for concern. How, in short, does the capacity for concern relate to caring. More to come.
Also, we’re not in this post looking into the very important movement in England, the psychosocial movement, and how they have shifted the conceptual vocabulary, from social work to the psychosocial (see British, Association for Psychosocial Studies).
Below, take a look at the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED, for how we might begin to see when and how the phrase, ‘to care for’ has been used.
In the Oxford English Dictionary you will find the following entry, “to care for: to take thought for, provide for, look after, take care of. Also with indirect passive.
c1230 Hali Meid. 5 He wile carien for hire.
1377 W. Langland Piers Plowman B. ii. 161 Þanne cared þei for caplus to kairen hem þider.
1535 Bible (Coverdale) Psalms xxxix. 17 I am poore & in mysery, but the Lorde careth for me.
a1616 W. Shakespeare Coriolanus (1623) i. i. 75 Who care for you like Fathers.
1676 M. Hale Contempl. Moral & Divine i. 183 He careth for us that knows what is fittest for us.
1858 ‘G. Eliot’ Janet's Repentance xxv, in Scenes Clerical Life II. 351 Infinite Love was caring for her.
1887 Manch. Guard. 14 Apr. 7 The child had..been well cared for.”
Oxford English Dictionary
Below, you see our search in Google ngram for the phrase, to care for. Ngram, with all of its limitations, is still quite interesting. It shows a peak in the appearance of the verb phrase around 1920, then a fairly rapid decline and a steady rise again around 1960. We’ll have more to say about this below. We have our own ideas about these significant lexical shifts but we’d like to hear from you. Please use the comment section below to share your thoughts. Here are just a few thoughts. The peak, 1918-1920, coincides with the early efforts to professionalize practice, in medicine, social work, and other fields. In 1915, Abraham Flexner, the author of the Flexner Report (establishing that medicine was a profession)wrote that social work was not yet a profession.
Google Ngram for, to care for
We did one more search in the OED and ngram for the phrase, the burden of caring. Below you see ‘burden of caring’ first first appearing under ‘compassion fatigue’ in 1995. We’ll soon visit with Dr. Peter Guarnaccia, an anthropologist, about the absence of this language among Latinx caregivers.
Oxford English Dictionary
We take a look next for the ngram search for the phrase, ‘burden of caring’.
Google Ngram for, burden of caring
Let us start with a brief look at some of the early work on the professions. In a future post, we’ll look more carefully at recent work on caring and the professions of caring. We begin with a very famous essay by the sociologist Talcott Parsons and with a quick look at Google Scholar and the number of times this important article has been cited: 2077. One can take a deep dive into these citations and learn a great deal about the influence of this one essay on all subsequent thinking about the professions.
Below we’ve highlighted in yellow an important passage.
What is important to note about Parsons is his influence on all subsequent work on the professions. Elliot Friedson, Andrew Abbott (this book has been cited more than 15,000 times), Pamela Abbott and Liz Meerabeau, for example, have all in different ways tackled the professions, the kinds of knowledge and practice produced by the professions, and the professionalization process. Here is the important passage:
“It seems evident that many of the most important features of our society are to a considerable extent dependent on the smooth functioning of the professions. Both the pursuit an the application of science and liberal learning are predominantly carried out in a professional context.” Parsons, 1939, Social Forces
Eliot Freidson, below, writes in 1989, for the Indiana Law Journal, his perspective on the the professions. It’s very different from Parsons, who was a functionalist. What does it mean to be a functionalist? This is an important question and deserves more attention than we’ll pay here. What is important to note about his functionalism is the the following. For Parsons the professions function to ensure the “smooth” functioning of society. This, of course, does to leave room to consider the possibility the professions serve other purposes.
“An additional characteristic of considerable importance for determining
what kind of work is done and how it is done lies in the organization of
the profession's clientele. If clients are relatively few in number, sophisticated,
well-organized and politically or economically powerful, the capacity
of members of a profession to select the work they do and determine how
they do it is markedly limited: their clients will call many of the shots. On
the other hand, if clients are many, unorganized, heterogeneous and individually
without significant resources of individual power, professionals are
in a better position to call most of the shots.” Freidson, 1989
Indiana Law Journal, 1989, Volume 64, Issue 3
This article discusses concepts of care mainly as developed in Scandinavian social research, analyzes the institutional differentiation of caring, and introduces a typology of caregiving work. "Caring" is defined differently in different societies, and the structure of care provision also differs. The article concludes with a discussion of the division of labor between public and private and between formal and informal caregiving. These processes, it is argued, interact with the gendered division of labor to produce a gendering of the social rights of citizenship.
References
Abbott, A. (2014). The system of professions: An essay on the division of expert labor. University of Chicago press.
Epstein, William M. "Professionalization of social work: The American experience." The Social Science Journal 29, no. 2 (1992): 153-166.
Heite, C. (2012). Setting and crossing boundaries: Professionalization of social work and social work professionalism. Social Work and Society, 10(2), online.
Hugman, R. (1996). Professionalization in social work: The challenge of diversity. International Social Work, 39(2), 131-147.
Kunzel, R. G. (1995). Fallen women, problem girls: Unmarried mothers and the professionalization of social work, 1890-1945. Yale University Press.
Olson, J. J. (2007). Social work's professional and social justice projects: Discourses in conflict. Journal of Progessive Human Services, 18(1), 45-69.
Tice, K. W. (1998). Tales of wayward girls and immoral women: Case records and the professionalization of social work. University of Illinois Press.
Wenocur, S., & Reisch, M. (1983). The social work profession and the ideology of professionalization. J. Soc. & Soc. Welfare, 10, 684.