SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL WORK: SCIENCE AND ART?

We live in an age of specialization and usually find it beneficial, perhaps even essential. However, we have been aware since Marx's time at least that the division of labor has its cost. And though we may be a long way from the unconpartmentalized utopia where an individual might do four different kinds of work in a single day, we cannot afford to let the assumptions which underlie the separation of important jobs and functions go without periodic reexamination. The separation of the work of the sociologist (or, indeed, any social scientist) and the social worker is one area where reconsideration is overdue. In examining the taken-for-granted bases of this division of labor, we may find they obscure more than they clarify. One version of the conceptual basis for the distinction between social work and sociology was offered by Robert Mclver in a series of lectures at the New York School of Social Work (later Columbia School of S.W.) in 1931. Mclver's lectures came at the end of a period o