CCETSW's Paper 30 was a brave and remarkable attempt to move beyond assimilationist and multicultural perspectives to challenge institutional racism within social work education, training and practice. However, its anti-racist initiative received a mixed response among practitioners who, as a group of professionals, do not share the same perspective regarding the role of social work in society. As Robert Pinker, an opponent of Paper 30, states:

In a sense, Pinker was right. Social work has always consisted of competing perspectives over, for example, its place within the welfare establishment, its attitude towards family values or the relative merits of its ‘caring’ and ‘controlling’ aspects. For ease of understanding, we can identify three broad perspectives concerning social work's role and function in society: ‘conservative’, ‘social democratic’ and ‘radical’. Each of these offers a different analysis of the role of social work and its relationship with its mainly poor and disadvantaged client groups, and hence, I will suggest they were always likely to respond differently to various anti-discriminatory initiatives. In order to understand social work's response to CCETSW's anti-racist developments, it is necessary to analyse historically how the differing social work perspectives emerged, and their underlying assumptions.

The origins of social work

Social work developed in the context of both industrialisation and urbanisation. Industrialisation created new demands for labour and redefined the categories of people who could be seen as suitable workers, marginalising those who were not part of the labour market. It also produced problems of low-waged employment, and seasonal and cyclical unemployment, which gave rise to increasing poverty, and the expansion of cities and towns which led to problems of housing, ill health and unsanitary living conditions (Clarke, 1993). This produced an element of fear among the middle classes, who believed that such developments would give rise to disorder and disruption, especially as the capacity of the traditional charitable institutions to respond to need was diminished (Mooney, 1998). The reforms that emanated from these concerns were devoted to reinforcing an appropriate system of social values centering on thrift, sobriety, self-discipline and family life.