Investigation Of Some Professional Issues In The Plight Of Community Service

As social work is a profession to help others, its professional issue is the premise whether the profession is accepted or not. In this paper, on the basis of practices in social work and applying the participant observation as well as half-open interview for nine social workers, the author aimed to explore the plight of social services in the community and analyzed main causes of difficulties, and based on which, made a discussion on professional issues of social work.This paper focused on five plights in social work practice by introducing five types of social workers like those who are easily led by nose, who “sing a monologue”, who conduct a continued involvement, who are flexible and who are bound, and by analyzing reasons why the plight had taken shape. Then the author discussed the professionalism of social work. The research shows that practical difficulties are resulted by the jointed influence of individual social workers and social system structure. On the one hand, social workers have the problems of unclear role, language barrier, problem-oriented service model, the lack of a clear understanding and classification of services; on the other hand,structural causes of social systems like imperfect institutional rules and regulations, slow localization of social work, talented social worker wastage, unreasonable social service organizations and projects evaluation, and lack of social service organization ’ s independence and so on, have many negative functions. As a result, these social dilemmas cause a huge challenge for professionalism of social work,which makes social work activities lost its character of professionalism and threatens the acceptance of social work in the community by public.In this article, based on the study of the dilemmas, the author explored the professionalism of social work from four aspects like role localization, professional culture sensibility, theoretical perspective to help others and professional approaches and details. What’ s more, the author gave some advice to enhance the professionalism of social work from personal point as a social worker in six aspects:to classify community services,to institutionalize the routine of service processes, to transform to capacity-building from a service model, to accelerate institution-building, to establishreasonable assessment system and to clarify relationship between social institutions and government departments.