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sive people "the old order changeth, giving place to new," and new adjustments of thought and life are constantly demanded. But the day in which we live is one in which the movements are more rapid and the changes more radical than the world has ever before witnessed, and the obligation laid upon us of watching those movements and guiding those changes is correspondingly stringent. For I suppose that we have some control over these social forces; that we may check them, and direct them to beneficent ends. There is a materialistic doctrine of political economy which represents them as unchangeable, inexorable, irreversible; which assumes that human will can do nothing to modify human conditions. The doctrine is false and mischievous.

It will be seen that the author uses the term "social forces" here almost casually, in a matter-of-fact way, as if anyone might be expected to appreciate as a matter of course what he intended by it. This is characteristic, in fact, of the development of the vocabulary of theoretic sociology. Nothing is, after all, more natural than that in a science, better, in the attempt to establish a science, which should deal with the material and problems of ordinary human experience, terms should be used which were familiar from ordinary human intercourse. Small has pointed out, in a discussion of the development of the category "process" into a formal sociological concept, that the term was absorbed in this same manner. It can also be noticed in the foregoing passage that the author uses the term "social forces" in a sense not unlike that which we have noted as the historians' conception. It seems not unlikely that the term may have been suggested to him for this purpose by his reading in historical writings of the time.

What Gladden understood "social forces" to be is further brought out by the chapter headings of his book, which were as follows: i, "The Factory"; ii, "The Labor Union"; iii, "The Corporation"; iv, "The Railway"; v, "The City"; vi, "The Church." Probably he recognized that to place these topics side by side under the general heading "social forces" was not a practice which would commend itself to critical thought, but his lectures were addressed to popular audiences, and he was making no attempt to be scientific.

When we turn to the main text of the book, we find that Gladden has introduced still another idea into his concept "social forces": social forces are taken to be those which draw and hold people together in effective social organizations; forces which make

for disorganization are "unsocial forces." We have already noted that some tendency to use the term in this sense appears in the literature of sociological theory:

Thus we see that while the factory is a social force in one way, it may become, and in fact is becoming, an unsocial force in another; it draws together in close relations people of the same class, but it tends, at present, to separate classes—to dig chasms and build barriers between the capitalists and the laborers, the employers and the employed.37

It is not certain just how much influence Washington Gladden's little book and its title had, either upon sociologists or upon social workers; but that it helped to make the term "social forces" familiar to those interested in concrete social questions and problems one can scarcely doubt. Park and Burgess have recorded a later appearance of the term among social workers:

Beginning in October, 1906, there appeared for several years in the journal of social workers, Charities and Commons, now The Survey, editorial essays upon social, industrial, and civic questions under the heading "Social Forces." In the first article E. T. Devine made the following statement: "In this column the editor intends to have his say from month to month about the persons, books, and events which have significance as social forces. . . . . Not all the social forces are obviously forces of good, although they are all under the ultimate control of a power which makes for righteousness."

Ten years later a group of members in the National Conference of Social Work formed a division under the title "The Organization of the Social Forces of the Community." The term community, in connection with that of social forces, suggests that every community may be conceived as a definite constellation of social forces. In this form the notion has been fruitful in suggesting a more abstract, intelligible, and at the same time sounder, conception of the community life.

Most of the social surveys made in recent years are based upon this conception of the community as a complex of social forces embodied in institutions and organizations.38

It is, after all, not the "social workers" in the narrowest conventional sense, i.e., the case workers attached to the social agencies of the large cities, and their immediate supervisors, who have been

"Loc. cit., p. 25. See also pp. 52-53: "The instinct of self-preservation was the force that drew them together"; also pp. 194-95, distinction between "centrifugal force" and "centripedal force."

38 Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, pp. 491-92; see also the context, and chap. vii, passim—the quotation is taken from the concluding section of the chapter.

given to talk of "social forces in the community," or "community forces." The social case workers, in this narrow sense of the term, have their attention focused upon problems of "helping people (and families) out of trouble." But there are other types of workers in the general field of social practice: those employed in one capacity or another in the new profession of "community organization,” settlement workers, and persons, often of great talent and vision, who have risen to positions where they are responsible for the fundamentals of administration and planning of the work of social agencies. These people, forced by the very nature of their work to seek for materials of social construction, have been naturally receptive to the conception of "social forces" which are more or less subject to control by social workers and reformers, and can be mobilized in constructive programs for community organization and community betterment.

Now the social case worker of today does not think of her cases as existing in a social vacuum or desert; on the contrary she knows very well that social case work consists in large part in readjustment of the person or family with reference to the social environment. But in diagnosing such a case the worker quite naturally and automatically enumerates and evaluates the factors of the social environment which are or may be significant in this case, in terms which serve to emphasize their meaning for this case, and these terms are quite likely to be different from those the community organization worker or the maker of a community survey would use in listing social forces in that community. Also the social case worker has a natural tendency to think of the forces having meaning for a particular case as "personal" forces, or as factors in a personal situation; hence the term "social forces" does not occur so frequently in their reports and literature.

With this explanation of the social case worker's point of view, it is not difficult to see in the following selections from a handbook for social case workers abundant content for the concept "social forces" in the concrete sense in which we are taking it in this section, although the expression "social forces" does not itself appear at all:

It should not be called "interpreting" a case merely to select out from the recorded items any one or two factors. This is rather the preliminary step toward interpretation. What has just been called the "conception" to which the facts in the case point is simply the idea of the whole network of causeeffect items which constitute it a "case." . . . . The social diagnosis must include this whole nexus of causal factors which make up its explanation. [Author illustrates with records of a case in which wife's failure to appreciate seriousness of husband's state of health, and her fear that the family would be separated, had been designated by the case worker as causal factors-better terms for the "key concepts," in the opinion of the author, would have been "wife and mother ignorant of health laws," and "ignorance of social resources."] 39

In the following there is rather more than a bare suggestion of the probable value to social workers of the classification of recurrent types of factors which occur in their cases:

Since any interpretation of facts relates them to a key concept, the interpretation of social facts, which in case work lie in many relations of the client's life, relates them not to one concept, but to what might be described as a constellation of concepts. Some of these meanings may be economic, some medical, some psychological and social. . . . . It is possible that these constellations of meanings, or of causally interwoven factors-different names for the same thing-are recurringly constant. That is, more knowledge and study may show that a certain type of sex misconduct in a girl is accompanied by other fairly constant characteristic social relationships and economic situations; that a given sort of mental makeup is found again and again in conjunction with the same social maladjustments.40

Probably no better summary of the present frontier of advance in social case work could be found than the following passage, which designates clearly enough the ground on which social worker and sociologist should be able to establish common conceptions of social forces:

The advance of knowledge in our field entails on the one hand a less simple idea of character than that which gets recorded in mere enumerations of traits. We must recognize it as a system of forces in which primary instincts are wrought upon by impulses deriving from man's innate social sensitiveness, so that a client's adjustment, from a "moral" point of view, is to be sought in part in motivations of which the client is unconscious. Our growing knowledge entails on the other hand a view of the social environment as Ada Eliot Sheffield, The Social Case History (1920), pp. 144-45.

40 Ibid., pp. 148-49; see also p. 201.

something less external to the personality involved in it. Its claims operate as strong suggestions operating within a socialized mind. The case worker, therefore, will be increasingly an expert engaged in mobilizing remedial influences by establishing relationships in her client's life: relationships that energize salutary motives among all the related parties. To this end she needs identified types of conduct and situation in order to control. She will, accordingly, so write her case histories as to clarify her own social concepts and to leave documents contributing something to the integrated insight of social science.41

Thomas has expressed very much the same ideas in the following:

The problem of the individual involves in its details the study of all the social influences and institutions-family, school, church, the law, the newspaper, the story, the motion picture, the occupations, the economic system, the unorganized personal relationships, the division of life into work and leisure time, etc. But the human wish underlies all social happenings and institutions, and human experiences constitute the reality beneath the formal social organization and behind the statistically formulated mass-phenomena. Taken in themselves, statistics are nothing more than symptoms of unknown causal processes. A social institution can be understood and modified only if we do not limit ourselves to the study of its formal organization, but analyze the way in which it appears in the personal experience of various members of the group, and follow the influence which it has in their lives. And an individual can be understood only if we do not limit ourselves to a cross-section of his life as revealed by a given act, a court record or a confession, or to the determination of what type of life-organization exists, but determine the means by which a certain life-organization is developed.42

In other words, when it is a question of dealing with concrete cases and problems, but also of developing an increasingly scientific technique for doing so, the methodological propositions of theorist and social worker converge.13 Park has said, "Sociology seems now in a way to become, in some fashion or other, an experimental science. It will become so as soon as it can state existing problems in such a way that the results in one case will demonstrate what can

"Sheffield, loc. cit., pp. 218-19.

"W. I. Thomas, The Unadjusted Girl, p. 244.

Miss Sheffield represents, of course, the social worker's point of view. W. I. Thomas is primarily interested in reaching theoretic conclusions; he considers himself a worker in the field of sociological research, although he has worked with very concrete materials and problems.

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