BRYN MAWR COLLEGE
GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

Human Behavior and the Social Environment II
SW #146
Fall 2000

Instructors

Jim Baumohl, Carolyn Needleman, Sandy Schram

 

Course Description

This course complements #141 and #142 (Human Behavior and the Social Environment I and III) and develops a social science theory base useful for #151 (Social Policy).  The course emphasizes social processes that transcend the individual, aiming to increase students' conceptual sophistication about the social context of human action and social work intervention.  Course readings, class discussion, and assignments focus on important unit ideas in social science theory and the relationships among them.  The concepts chosen for discussion are particularly relevant to social work and social welfare. The course is organized around the historic tension within social work practice between micro and macro approaches and seeks to help students think about the relationships and interconnections between the two.  The course seeks to do this in several ways.  First, it examines key conceptual issues in social theory that help to think about human behavior as something that takes place within and is constructed out of social environment.  Second, the course uses social theory to analyze how social work practice is itself an artifact of its social environment and is subject to similar sorts of influences in terms of how it comes to define, treat and respond to the problems clients are deemed to have.  Third, the course uses social theory to examine how social work practice is conducted in institutional, organizational, and bureaucratic settings that affect what it can and can not do.  In all three ways, social theory is used in this course to provide students with conceptual resources for analyzing how human behavior, including both the actions of clients and social work practitioners are conditioned and constrained as well as enabled and empowered by broader social forces.  The course addresses these issues of social theory in terms of questions regarding social justice.  Issues of diversity are included as part of that context for addressing these issues.  The overall goal of the course is to facilitate students' use of contemporary social theory to contextual, critique and constructively offer alternatives to current ways in which social work practice approaches issues of human behavior and the treatment of client problems.

 

Course Objectives

The course helps students:
1.        Appreciate how social theory aids the understanding of social problems;
2.        Develop a working knowledge of critical social science concepts with important bearing on social work practice at all levels;
3.        Develop skills in using social science concepts to analyze practice;
4.        Use social theory to develop ways to contextualize, critique and construct alternatives to current ways of defining client problems;
5.        Enhance critical reading skills;
6.        Enhance writing skills;
7.        Develop skills applying social theory to concrete social work issues.
8.        Analyze issues of social theory in terms of questions of social justice.
9.        Apply social theory to issues of diversity.

 

Course Requirements

1.        Completion of assigned readings on schedule;
2.        Active participation in class discussion;
3.        Completion of an ungraded writing sample of approximately 5 double-spaced pages and 2 written assignments of 7 to 10 double-spaced pages
           based on readings and class discussion.  The writing sample should discuss some aspect of equality as envisioned by Edward Bellamy
           Looking Backward.  Other assignments will be discussed and distributed at least 2 weeks before they are due.

 

Required Texts

In addition to the books listed below, other assigned readings are on reserve in the Canaday library and available through e-reserves on the library webpage.  The books are listed in the order in which they will be used.
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (NY: Signet, 1960; originally published in 1887).
Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins, 1978).
Kai Erikson, Everything in its Path (NY:  Simon and Schuster, 1976).
Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).
Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy (NY:  Russell Sage, 1980).

 

Reading Assignments

All reading is required.
When there is more than one assignment for a class, they are listed in the order in which they should be read.

 

Week of
 
 

9/4:  Introduction

Overview of the course, review of the syllabus, class introductions.
 

No reading required.
 
 

9/11:  A Future of the Past

Social Theory in historical context, the late 19th Century as crucible for social work concerns, the emergence of the idea of social problems and the need for their treatment.  Contrast issues of social justice in terms of then and now.
 

Bellamy, Looking Backward.

Ungraded Writing Sample Distributed
 

(You can use the world wide web to look for information about the book we are reading this week (Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1857) in Social Work 146 Human Behavior and the Social Environment II.  Using a computer, you can go on the World Wide Web or Internet by starting the Netscape program or any other Internet browser. Click here to go on the Internet to places that have information about Looking Backward: Looking Backward Links). Call if you want more instructions.)
 
 

9/18:  Community

The debate about the importance of theorizing Gesellshaft and Gemeinshaft, the viability of community as a meaningful concept of social theory, the shift in social theory from community to networks.
 

Bender, Community and Social Change in America.
 

(Ungraded writing sample is due.)
 
 

9/25: Social Networks and Social Capital

Social networks as an alternative to community, social network analysis, social capital vs. human capital, social embeddness as resource and cultural reserve
 

Barry Wellman, Peter J. Carrington, and Alan Hall, "Networks as Personal Communities," in Barry Wellman and S. D. Berkowitz, eds. Social Structures: A Network Approach (Greenwich CT: JAI Press, Inc., 1997 [orig. 1988]), pp. 130-184.
 

Robert Putnam, "The Strange Disappearance Of Civic America," American Prospect 24 (Winter 1996): 34-48. (http://wilsontxt.hwwilson.com/pdfhtml/04591/1V5D8/0SM.htm)
 

Steven N. Durlauf, "The Case “Against” Social Capital," Focus 20, 3 (Fall 1999): 1-5. (http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/irp/pubs/foc203.pdf)
 

FIRST ASSIGNMENT DISTRIBUTED
 
 

10/2:  Culture and Community

Contrasting culture to community and networks as key concepts in social theory, the debates about the viability of culture as a concept for explaining human behavior, the relationship of culture to ways of conceptualizing problems in human behavior.
 

Erikson, Everything in its Path.
 
 

10/9:  Culture and Poverty

The relationship of culture to poverty, debates about the viability of the culture of poverty as a meaningful concept, variations in the culture of poverty argument, contrasting individual, cultural and political-economic explanations of poverty, multi-dimensional approaches, issues of class, race and gender in social theorizing of poverty.
 

Katz, The Undeserving Poor.
 
 

10/16:  FALL BREAK
 
 

10/23:  Discussion
 

(Assignment #1 is due.)
 
 

10/30:  The Social Construction of Social Problems

Social constructionism, the "myth of the given," social problems as products of social process, social forces in the perception of individual problems, and human behavior as performance and enactment according social scripts. Race, class and gender constructions are emphasized.
 

Herbert Blumer, "Social Problems as Collective Behavior," Social Problems, 18 (1971), 298-306.
 

Craig Reinarman, "The Social Construction of an Alcohol Problem:  The Case of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and Social Control in the 1980s," Theory and Society, 17 (1988), 91-120.
 
 

11/6:  Deviance

Individual problems as social constructed, deviance as socially relative, the double-meaning of normativity, treatment as socially constructed, medicalization as a primary example in contemporary social work practice.
 

Walter Gove, "The Labelling Perspective:  An Overview," in Walter R. Gove, ed., The Labelling of Deviance (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1975), 3-20.
 

Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider, Deviance and Medicalization (Philadelphia:  Temple, 1992, expanded edition), 1-37 (Chapters 1 and 2).
 

SECOND ASSIGNMENT DISTRIBUTED
 
 

11/13:  Distribution in the Welfare State

Various Distributive principles (work, need, ascription); the organization of the welfare state into categorical domains; the symbolic and material importance of categorical distinctions; the technical demands of boundary maintenance.
 

Deborah A. Stone, The Disabled State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), pp. 15-28.
 
 

11/20:  Professionalism and Bureaucracy

Professional biases, bureaucratic constraints, conflicts between professionalism and bureaucratic accountability, the social context of social work practice, the theory of "street-level bureaucracy," how the realities of practice drive the provision of assistance.
 

Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy.
 
 

11/27:  Social Movements

Social movements as the vehicles for constructing social problems, facilitating their recognition, and engendering responses, differences between old and new social movements, the newness of old social movements and the oldness of new ones, the interrelationships between the "politics of recognition" and the "politics of redistribution."
 

J. McCarthy and M. Zald, "Resource Mobilization and Social Movements," American Journal of Sociology, 82 (1977), 1212-41.
 

Renee Anspach, "From Stigma to Identity Politics: Political Activism Among the Physically Disabled and Former Mental Patients, Social Science and Medicine, 13A (1979), 765-73.
 

Rob Rosenthal, "Dilemmas of Local Anti-Homelessness Movements," in Jim Baumohl, ed., Homelessness in America (Phoenix: Oryx, 1996), 201-12; 253-5 (notes).
 
 

12/4:  Distributive Justice & Social Work Practice

The relationship or lack thereof between clinical treatment and advocacy for social justice, tensions between macro and micro social work practice, the ways in which they can be related, the legitimacy of the idea that they may not be, the varieties of social work for the varieties of problems addressed, questioning the need for unity in the profession, the value of diversity in practice.  Social justice as a goal of social work is foregrounded.
 

Jerome C. Wakefield, "Psychotherapy, Distributive Justice, and Social Work:  Part 1:  Distributive Justice as a Conceptual Framework for Social Work," Social Service Review, 62 (1988), 187-210.
 

Jerome C. Wakefield, "Psychotherapy, Distributive Justice, and Social Work: Part 2:  Psychotherapy and the Pursuit of Justice," Social Service Review, 62 (1988), 353-82.
 
 

12/11 Concluding Discussion
 

(Assignment #2 is due 12/11.)