Key Values, Ethics, and Skills for Working with People ● 53In line with the discussion in chapter 1, other social work authors who
have addressed the topic of values and ethics have pointed to a long-standing
tension in social work values, between the personal and the political—the
casework movement, on one hand, and the settlement movement, on the
other (Cowden and Pullen-Sansfacon 2014). Despite practice frameworks
emphasizing that the personal is political and that it is important to think of
personal problems in a political context, workers often choose to put more
effort into one end or the other of the micro- to macrocontinuum. To an
extent, this obscures the sometimes difficult dilemmas that can arise between
individual needs and social or political ideals. Helping a person or a family
might obscure a wider social issue, and dealing with the social issue might
leave a family in distress for a longer time.
In the United Kingdom, Banks (2006) traced broad changes in social work
values around these two trajectories, from an individual casework orientation
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to communitarian per-
spectives through most of the rest of the twentieth century and back to more
individualistic values under the rise of neoliberalism over recent decades.
Writing from the United States, Reamer (2006) pointed to a morality
period during the late nineteenth century when human service workers were
concerned with improving the morality of clients. This shifted during the
period of the settlements in the early twentieth century, at least for num-
bers of social workers who became concerned with social justice and poverty.
These concerns were also prominent during the time of the Great Depression
in the 1930s. In 1947, the American Association of Social Workers ratified
its first code of ethics; core values and core principles were refined by many
similar associations in other countries over the following decades. Reamer
identified the 1960s and 1970s as a period in which social workers became
concerned with values clarification—how to align personal and professional
values. Beginning in the 1970s, members of the profession began to turn
their minds to applied ethics. This was prompted by advancing technology
in health care and concerns over scarcity of financial and other resources to
help all who needed care. The civil rights movements of the 1970s also drew
attention to practical ethical concerns (Reamer 2006).
Internationally, risk management has become a significant focus over
recent decades. Many organizations, including registration bodies, focus on
management of practitioners’ ethical conduct and management of the risk of
litigation from service users (Reamer 2013; van Heugten 2011a).
Alongside this focus on risk management, since the 1980s, theorists
and practitioners have begun to draw attention to the complexity of ethical
dilemmas and ethical decision making and to the reality that it is not always
possible to arrive at perfectly balanced decisions that will satisfy all those