Understanding Social Community Work: Goals and Dynamics
Why Work in Social Community?
Introduction
We define community social work as a discipline rooted in the values of democratic citizenship, based on scientific methodology. It addresses problems requiring a collective response through diagnosis, planning, organization, development, and evaluation. This process involves an enrichment process (empowerment) for both staff and the community.
Basic Goals of Community Social Work
Community social work has two primary objectives, which shape its methodology as a scientific discipline:
- Enable individuals to effectively interact within a community, developing the necessary social interaction skills to function as citizens. We define empowerment as an inward, personal process aimed at enhancing our ability to interface as an essential part of life.
- Enable specific communities to address collective problems, defend their interests, and achieve goals that cannot be attained individually, as they pertain to the structural dimension of social life. This can be defined as outward, community empowerment.
The Dynamics of Social Exclusion in Technologically Advanced Societies
Structure and Social Change: Perspectives on Social Order
The increasing divergence between the legal order (stemming from the French Revolution and based on citizen’s rights) and the economic order (driven by the scientific and technological revolution, which brought progress but also misery and poverty) highlights the structural reorganization of society as a critical issue for the survival of our way of life.
Key thinkers and their perspectives:
- Saint-Simon: Proposed a society based on cooperation through the use of knowledge and organization derived from the scientific method.
- Comte: Believed that the driving force of history is the progress of humanity, understood as the dominance of altruistic tendencies over selfish ones.
- Spencer: Described societies and groups that cooperate to achieve common goals.
This new approach to analyzing social problems led to the development of methodologies for reorganizing communities with a clear purpose: to pursue common goals that involve structural change.
Democracy and Capitalism: Community Relations in Industrial Societies
Praxis and Social Relations in Karl Marx
Karl Marx focused on the study of social relations and the contradictions and conflicts between various dimensions of social reality, viewed through the dialectical interaction between social actors and social structures.
Humans are defined by their social practice, which is mediated by organizational forms that allow for survival, adaptability, and environmental transformation.
From the definition of human life as intrinsically social, two dimensions emerge:
- The analysis of the production of life, through the objectification of the natural world through action, i.e., work.
- Analysis of the structural features of capitalist societies, distinguishing between forces and modes of production, and analyzing class conflict.
Marx described four types of alienation in capitalist society:
- Workers are alienated from their productive activities to the extent that they do not work to meet their own needs.
- Workers are alienated from the object of their activity: the product of their work.
- Workers are alienated from their fellow employees to the extent that cooperative relations are replaced by competitive relationships, subordination, and isolation.
- Workers are alienated from their own capacity for self-realization.
Community and Democracy: Relations in Alexis de Tocqueville’s View
Alexis de Tocqueville focused on analyzing the structural factors that shape each historical period. He analyzed in detail the characteristics of each society and the trends that can be foreseen, always considering that the future will be the result of human actions, where both future contingencies and past events play a role.
He started with a key fact: democracy, which constitutes the decisive factor that shapes society structurally. Therefore, social change processes are analyzed from the binomial democracy-citizens.
Three key features of his thought are: