Contributions to social work of relational and feminist theories

Abstract

There has traditionally been fierce debate in social work between supporters of individual/family intervention and those who advocate group/community intervention, to the extent that two completely opposed and even frequently clashing approaches have developed. It has been solidened to consider that individual/family social work is aimed at improving its subjects’ living conditions, intervening in microsocial aspects of problems and seeking to better adapt individuals to the system. Meanwhile, group/community social work is intended to change social structures in order to facilitate the development of individual and group wellbeing. However, from our perspective these two standpoints are reductive and ultimately lead to an impoverishment of the profession and of the theories that underpin them. Humans can only be understood in terms of their relationship with the environment in which they develop, in constant interaction and as part of a mutual construction process. Any practice that is intended to achieve satisfactory results must therefore integrate these two approaches. We believe that the essential and distinguishing element of this profession may in fact be its capacity to establish itself as an inter-relational change agent between person and environment. In this paper, we refer to certain ideas that we consider may be useful in helping to overcome this duality. We identify contributions from relational and feminist theories that we consider useful in order to achieve the integration of these two aspects of social work.