Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social
Work. By Karen W. Tice. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Pp. 260. $49.95 (cloth); $26.95
(paper).
Social work case records are used by Tice to make two knowledge claims about the early history
(1895-1930) of practice: 1) social workers non-reflexively inscribed into case records practitioner
and client subjectivity; and, 2) case records functioned to invent and reproduce the profession.
Though she examines only social work, those who study practice more generally will find the book
relevant and challenging.
In the last decade, historians and social scientists have used social constructivism to
interpret social work practice. And almost without exception these works share a common
methodology: the exclusive use of the practitioner's written texts. Tales of Wayward Girls and
Immoral Women is representative of this relatively recent historiographical genre that uses the
case record to write the subjectivity of social workers.
Tice skillfully documents and crafts her narrative of case records, effectively uses secondary
sources, and produces new interpretations from the reading of hundreds of primary records. And as a
"former" social worker, she seeks to dissociate from those accounts that reduce practice to social
control. Yet she falls short of the goal. The problem is not in the marshaling of data but in the
thorough examination of social work texts. The work is seriously compromised by its methodological
silence on what the case record is not. This book cannot be-like the genre that it represents-a
dependable history of social work practice; it fails to specify what the written texts reliably and
validly represent. Tice is not alone, however. In most recent accounts of social work, scholars do
not provide even a footnote on the epistemological status of case records. In short, from
deconstructed texts, reliable claims about the hidden truths of social work practice must remain
suspect, until we have a way of knowing what the "written" represents.
Tice summarizes in a chapter, "I'll Be Watching You," the historical gaze she deploys to reveal
the hidden motives of social workers. Case recording accomplished two interrelated tasks for the
emergent profession. First, it provided the method to separate unscientific from scientific
charity. Because Progressive era activists and caseworkers opposed indiscriminate charity-"not alms
but a friend"-they needed data on single cases of poverty, illness, and social maladjustment.
Social workers left clinics and offices for face-to-face, community-based interaction; and by
engaging the subject of inquiry in a helping relationship, their "close association" method of
observation produced the need for case recording.
Second, Tice correctly points out that in watching, seeing, and making "cases" specific "looks"
are required. Michel Foucault called this look a "disciplinary gaze." Writing cases, moreover,
required discussions of how records should be organized and written. These "how to" questions
helped demarcate the "borders" between charity work and the emergent profession. The most important
contribution of this work lies in the strength of its comparison of how early leaders and educators
wrote about case writing; and in showing us how the different schools of thought emanated from
them, she demonstrates how particular casework methods corresponded with unique narrative
styles.
Tice constructs her narrative around an intensive case study ("Hazel") and from her reading of
hundreds of primary records she derives two composite types. Through Miss Sarah Champine's-a
caseworker with the Girl's Department of the Minneapolis Citizen's Aid Society-narrative production
of Hazel we learn about the details of everyday life. Miss Champine, among other things, goes with
Hazel to shop for school clothes. Here, the social worker uses a seemingly innocuous and everyday
event to inscribe Hazel's deepest desires. Because Hazel's clinic-based psychiatrist did not have
access to shopping data, Tice argues that the psychiatric narration was theoretical, universal, and
totalizing. Hazel, through the psychiatric gaze, was a case of "…an introversion, and a paranoid
tendency which are unhealthy mentally and inimical to a satisfactory wholesome personality
adjustment" (p.85). Contrariwise, according to Tice, the social worker relied "upon common-sense
attributions that lacked the conceptual tidiness of psychiatry" (p. 86). Miss Champine recorded
events that reveal her "parentlike" struggle with Hazel's spending, dressing, and socializing
habits.
Through sifting and reshuffling the case records from several prominent social service agencies,
Tice identifies two types of early case recording: tales of detection and protection. Tales of
detection reveal a disciplinary agent who uses moral authority as an "instrument of social
discipline." Drawn from everyday "signifiers of face, appearance, family history, housekeeping and
physical examinations"(p.123), social workers compiled probative evidence. In tales of protection,
however, Tice points to a compassionate social worker, one who builds trust and friendship,
believing that a good relationship overrides the "heavy-handed" approach. Regardless of the kind of
tale, Tice argues that social workers write their white middle class subject position onto the
client and into the record. Thus, most social work practice ideologically suppressed the "politics
of representation." Case records were used not only to write client subjectivity. Texts were also
deployed to persuade a wary public of social work's usefulness-Chapter Six, "Tales of
Accomplishment." Fundamental to the process of making a profession is the acquisition of public
support (see, Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor,
Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1988). Tice effectively shows how case material was
rewritten as dramatic story, morality play, and scientific exhibit. And surely these practices were
also about attempts to claim professional jurisdiction over chronic poverty, illness, and social
maladjustment.
Though written texts provide grounds for empirical discovery, a very important question remains:
is the case record a replication of the actual social work practice? This remains, I believe, the
unasked epistemological question that undermines conclusions drawn exclusively from the analysis of
written texts. For example, in an important recent work, the process of reducing culture to text is
questioned. Silverstein and Urban write that "to equate culture with its resultant texts is to miss
the fact that texts (as we see them, the precipitates of continuous cultural processes) represent
one, "thing-y" phase in a broader conceptualization of cultural processes" (Michael. Silverstein
and Greg. Urban, The Natural History of Discourse, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1996,
p.1). Written texts need to be (con)textualized with oral narratives.
Social workers have left mountains of written texts for the vigilant eye of the historian-the
historical gaze. I think, however, that until the interrelated ontological and epistemological
problem is addressed, scholars often reconstitute from written texts only proximate accounts of
social work. Why? Because "actual" practice is comprised of both oral and written narratives. In
other words, social workers' voices are silenced by forces-organizational, political, theoretical,
and personal-that constrain any particular written accounts of lived experience. If it were
possible to combine and juxtapose written and oral narratives of historical events, then what piece
of the total experience would the written represent? The latter epistemological question is avoided
by Tice and most related accounts of practice. Until the oral and written accounts of social
workers are compared, we cannot know what the written reliably and validly represents. We need more
ethnographies of social work practice, for example, to compare the oral with the textual production
of clients. By establishing what is left out of written documents, we might revisit historical
texts and examine more carefully what piece of practice the written represents.
I speculate that the written tells us more about the use of particular disciplinary
knowledge\power schemes than it does about social worker subjectivity. And it is here where recent
historiography on social work and Tice's work are useful. Case records, for example, could be used
to trace the myriad ways knowledge schemes were disseminated from the university to the social
service agency. However, many scholars, eager to use Foucault to demonstrate the power of "the
gaze," use the written text to deduce more worker subjectivity than may be warranted. I think
Foucault pointed to this problem when he noted the difference between the "universal" and the
"specific" intellectual (Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, pp.
66-75). The universal intellectual applies totalizing and essentializing schemes, while the
specific relies on the particularity of the case. Foucault used the social worker as an exemplar of
the specific intellectual. He did not work the issue any further; but I think that studies of
social work practice require the concept, "disciplinary gaze," or disciplinary knowledge\power, and
the concept situated knowledge\power. Ethnographies of social work, for example, point to how the
situated-the personal, strategic, and contextual-is not included in the case record; instead, it is
captured only in the oral production of client subjectivity (See, for example, Alice Burton,
"Dividing up the Struggle: The Consequences of "Split" Welfare Work for Union Activism," in
Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis, edited by Michael Burawoy,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
Tice unwittingly points to the situated when she talks about Miss Champine's "common-sense
attributions." Though Tice uses Sarah's written texts, we do not learn whether or not Sarah was a
product of an early school of social work. Would such a detail matter? Indeed: Sarah's personal
contribution to the written text is surely affected by her education and prior experience; this
might account for Sarah's "common-sense attributions." Sarah's disciplinary gaze may reflect more
an applied parental and common-sense belief system than a "scientific" gaze. On this matter, Tice,
revealingly, calls Sarah's demeanor "parent-like." Thus,we need both the disciplinary and situated
concepts and we must examine both the oral and written narratives.
Though Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women ignores the ontological and epistemological
problems of practice, it is in my opinion one of the best among the recent studies of social work
practice, especially among those influenced by Michel Foucault. Tice has carefully culled from
records and social work literature examples which will help reconstruct the history of social work
practice.
Jerry Floersch, University of North Texas
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