What Kind of Sociology is Useful to Social Workers?

Both social workers and sociologists have been trying desperately for more than a century to live down their miscellaneous ancestry. Both are still embarrassed that their disciplines are rooted historically in the work of oldtime clergy, police, utopian philosophers, sentimentalists, reactionary manipulators, and radical thinkers and agitators. Nevertheless it was from those men\u27s and women\u27s concerns, their perceptions of social problems, their efforts at social amelioration and reform or revolution, and their inter-cult conflicts that the two corps of modern professionals sprang