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Human Services in the Network Society: Introduction to the Special Issue

The articles in this special issue are all directly connected to or influenced by an international research symposium held in Glasgow, Scotland, in September 2009. The symposium was hosted by the Institute for Advanced Studies and organized by ‘‘Connected Practice,’’ a research unit within the Glasgow School of Social Work. The symposium was titled ‘‘Human Services in the Network Society,’’ and its purpose was to provide a focus for an international exchange about the changes, challenges, and opportunities networked technologies are bringing to the lives of the users of human services and to the practice of human service practitioners. Walter LaMendola (1988) was among the first human service practitioners to document human service activity in what we now call the network society. In 1985 he had identified over 300 separate electronic network sites in Denver, Colorado, alone. He classified human service activity in networks at that time into six categories: public service networks, community networks, human service organization networks, professional networks, and client centered networks (p. 240). He concluded by saying that