Status Enhancement and Social Problem Concerns: An Essay on the

Social work's ability to contribute to the development of a more just and humanistic society is currently Inhibited by a state-level preoccupation with status enhancement. Professional status conscious-ness, in Itself, does have potential for promoting developmental forms of professional accountability and the further humanization of service bureaucracies. Current circumstances, however, prevent the fulfillment of either of these potentials. Professional accountability mechanisms necessarily depend upon the actual or threatened withdrawal of privilege or prestige. A fundamental erosion of status consciousness would reduce the subjective signifi-cance of sanctions and lessen their effectiveness in preventing pro-fessional negligence and abuse. The developmental character of status accountability, however, is distorted by the distribution of the external sources of potential sanction. Since these sources of sanction generally exclude economically and culturally marginal social sectors