According to Netting et. al. (1993) it is:

• Professionally directed intervention

• Designed to bring about planned change

• Macro systems (organizations and communities)

Client system: an individual, family, group, organization, or community who will ultimately benefit from our intervention.

Target system: the individual, group, organization, or community to be changed or influenced to achieve our goals.
 

Change agent system: the individual who initiates the macro change system.

Action system: Those people who agree and are committed to working in order to attain the proposed macro change.

Micro Level: Intervention with individuals.

Mezzo Level: Intervention with family and groups.

Macro Level: Intervention with programs, organizations, and/or communities.

Definitions of social justice

Social justice has to do with fairness and equity in the distribution of opportunity, in the treatment of individuals, in the assurance of personal and economic security, and the protection of civil and human rights. (Paul Ylvisaker)
 

An ideal condition in which all members of a society have the same basic rights, protection, opportunities, obligations, and social benefits. (The Social Work Dictionary)

1. People have a moral responsibility to help themselves as best they can.
2. When individuals are unable to help themselves, it is the responsibility of those closest to them to help.
3. As a rule, every community ought to be expected to do the best it can to take care of its own.
4. Societies (collections of communities) must help communities whose ability to help their members is severely limited.
5. Social justice is an inter-community issue, not only an intra-community matter.

• Law and order can be restored without turning the country of the free into a police state.
• The family can be saved without forcing women to stay at home or otherwise violating their rights.
• Schools can provide essential moral education without indoctrinating young people.
• People can live in communities without turning into vigilantes and becoming hostile to one another.
• Strong rights presume strong responsibilities
• The pursuit of self-interest can be balanced with a commitment to the community.
• Public interest can reign without denying the legitimate interests of the various constituencies that make up America.

Excerpt from The Careless Society (McKnight), pages 98-99:
 
My father recently told me that during the New Deal when Franklin Roosevelt was president, most people understood this country as a place where there were interests that were the enemies of the common people. But, he said, today we identify the enemy of the people as poverty, sickness, and disease. My father insists that the enemy isn't poverty, sickness, and disease. He argues that the enemy is a set of institutions and interests that are advantaged by clienthood and dependency. . . . . . The enemy is a set of interests that need dependency masked as service.

What is your reaction to this statement?

Do you think he would identify social work as one of those interests?

1.  Translation of need into deficiency.

2.  Placing the perceived deficiency in the client.

3.  Specialization à advanced technique and technology.

Definition of Client Need

• You are deficient
• You are the problem
• You have a collection of problems

• We need deficiency
• The economic unit we need it individuals
• The productive economic unit we need is an individual with multiple needs

• Human service interventions have negative effects as well as benefits.

• Human service interventions are only one way to address the conditions of people who are labeled.

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