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Reflections of a Social Work Practitioner: Bridging the 19th and 21st Centuries

This is a practitioner’s personal account of social work as a profession. The primary purpose of the article is to offer a vantage outside traditional academic explorations of this topic. A principal theme is the current state of professionalism in social work, especially in reference to Abraham Flexner’s 1915 critique of the field. The author maintains that social work is unquestionably a profession and that the time has arrived to move beyond the repeated questioning of ourselves. Drawing on the pragmatic experimentalism of Jane Addams, the author suggests a refocusing, or re-viewing, of social work as a relational field. This departs from the traditional focus on targeted functions and groups that define our purposes and methods and contribute to interdisclipinary debates about the true nature of social work.