48 ● Kate van Heugten and Anita Gibbs
The Place of Values in PracticeChapter 1 discusses the history of social work and sociology and some of the
issues that underlie their separate developments, including the major differences
of opinion that arose around the place of values. Sociologists have always
studied values and had an interest in value change and the intersections of
values and cultures, education, and class. The descriptive study of values in
human systems has always been uncontroversial. Some sociologists, however,
have believed that it is essential that researchers, theorists, and educators
adopt a position of value neutrality, to ensure that they do not impose their
biases on their field of study. They have avoided declaring their values and
have tried to refrain from judging the rightness or wrongness of value positions
(Shaw 2009).
Over recent decades, postpositivist sociologists and critical sociologists
have argued that sociologists are not value-neutral and that they should
declare their beliefs so that those become open to critique (Plummer 2010).
This position became sufficiently widely accepted to find its way into official
codes of ethics, such as the Code of Ethics of the Sociological Association of
Aotearoa New Zealand (1990), which reads, “2(ii) Sociologists should recognise
research as not neutral and should make explicit their epistemological postu-
lates and assumptions.” Public sociologists go further by becoming engaged
in active practice to achieve social justice, environmental sustainability, and
solutions to social problems such as poverty (Jeffries 2009).
Beyond this, social work requires that practitioners incorporate values when
making practical decisions. Because social work practice aims to achieve
prosocial outcomes to benefit individuals and communities, values are at the
core of practice interventions. Reamer (2013, 15) wrote that values influ-
ence “(1) the nature of social work’s mission; (2) the relationships that social
workers have with clients, colleagues, and members of the broader society;
(3) the methods of intervention that social workers use in their work; and (4)
the resolution of ethical dilemmas.” It is not possible to remain value-neutral,
a mere observer, when undertaking social work practice. Nor is it possible
for other social scientists to remain neutral when they become engaged in
human service practice or policy development work. Choices that workers
make in practice inevitably have implications for people’s lives. (Of course,
this is also true in pure research, but the consequences are usually less imme-
diately obvious.)
While they are expected to pursue value-laden goals, human service workers
learn that they must also avoid imposing their own personal values on others.
This suggests that there is a hierarchy of values whereby some are seen as
disciplinary imperatives, and others as personal ideology.