Social Work's Professional and Social Justice Projects

Abstract This article argues that social work has two distinct and very different projects that are so conflated that they are indistinguishable from one another; the social justice project and the professional project. The social justice project seeks to transform the conditions that permit the existence of preventable human suffering. The professional project positions social work as a profession in a system of professions in competition with one another for jurisdictional turf. The effect of this conflation is that social justice discourses are rendered instrumental vehicles of the professional project. After laying out this thesis, this article discusses ways to reverse this relationship so that professionalization can be made to serve the ends of social justice.