social service, any of numerous publicly or privately provided services intended to aid disadvantaged, distressed, or vulnerable persons or groups. The term social service also denotes the profession engaged in rendering such services. The social services have flourished in the 20th century as ideas of social responsibility have developed and spread.

The basic concerns of social welfare—poverty, disability and disease, the dependent young and elderly—are as old as society itself. The laws of survival once severely limited the means by which these concerns could be addressed; to share another’s burden meant to weaken one’s own standing in the fierce struggle of daily existence. As societies developed, however, with their patterns of dependence between members, there arose more systematic responses to the factors that rendered individuals, and thus society at large, vulnerable.

Religion and philosophy have tended to provide frameworks for the conduct of social welfare. The edicts of the Buddhist emperor Aśoka in India, the sociopolitical doctrines of ancient Greece and Rome, and the simple rules of the early Christian communities are only a few examples of systems that addressed social needs. The Elizabethan Poor Laws in England, which sought relief of paupers through care services and workhouses administered at the parish level, provided precedents for many modern legislative responses to poverty. In Victorian times a more stringent legal view of poverty as a moral failing was met with the rise of humanitarianism and a proliferation of social reformers. The social charities and philanthropic societies founded by these pioneers formed the basis for many of today’s welfare services.

Because perceived needs and the ability to address them determine each society’s range of welfare services, there exists no universal vocabulary of social welfare. In some countries a distinction is drawn between “social services,” denoting programs, such as health care and education, that serve the general population, and “welfare services,” denoting aid directed to vulnerable groups, such as the poor, the disabled, or the delinquent. According to another classification, remedial services address the basic needs of individuals in acute or chronic distress; preventive services seek to reduce the pressures and obstacles that cause such distress; and supportive services attempt, through educational, health, employment, and other programs, to maintain and improve the functioning of individuals in society. Social welfare services originated as emergency measures that were to be applied when all else failed. However, they are now generally regarded as a necessary function in any society and a means not only of rescuing the endangered but also of fostering a society’s ongoing, corporate well-being.

The majority of personal social services are rendered on an individual basis to people who are unable, whether temporarily or permanently, to cope with the problems of everyday living. Recipients include families faced with loss of income, desertion, or illness; children and youths whose physical or moral welfare is at risk; the sick; the disabled; the frail elderly; and the unemployed. When possible, services are also directed toward preventing threats to personal or family independence.

Social services generally place a high value on keeping families together in their local communities, organizing support from friends or neighbours when kinship ties are weak. Where necessary, the services provide substitute forms of home life or residential care, and play a key role in the care and control of juvenile delinquents and other socially deviant groups, such as drug and alcohol abusers.

Modern evolution

In the advanced industrial societies the personal social services have always constituted a “mixed economy of welfare,” involving the statutory, voluntary, and private sectors of welfare provision. Although the role of personal social services is crucial, they account for only a small proportion of total welfare expenditures. The most substantial increases in expenditures have occurred in social security systems, which provide assistance to specific categories of claimants on the basis of both universal and selective criteria. The development of modern social security systems from the 1880s reflects not only a gradual but fundamental change in the aims and scope of social policy but also a dramatic shift in expert and popular opinion with regard to the relative significance of the social and personal causes of need.

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In the belief that personal shortcomings were the chief cause of poverty and of people’s inability to cope with it, the major 19th-century systems of poor relief in western Europe and North America tended to withhold relief from all but the truly destitute, to whom it was given as a last resort. This policy was intended as a general deterrent to idleness. The poor-law relieving officer was the precursor of both the public assistance officials and the social workers of today in his command of statutory financial aid. The voluntary charitable agencies of the time differed on the relative merits of deterrent poor-law services on the one hand, implying resistance to the growth of statutory welfare, and on the provision of alternative assistance to the needy, coupled with the extension of statutory services, on the other hand. From the 1870s the Charity Organization Society and similar bodies in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere held strongly to the former option, and their influence was widespread until the outbreak of World War II.

The settlement movement in Britain and the United States drew voluntary workers into direct contact with the serious material disadvantages suffered by the poor. The pioneer of this movement was the vicar Samuel A. Barnett, who in 1884 with his wife and a number of university students “settled” in a deprived area of London, calling their neighbourhood house Toynbee Hall. Two visitors to this settlement soon introduced the movement into the United States—Stanton Coit, who founded Neighborhood Guild (later University Settlement) on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1886, and Jane Addams, who with Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House on the Near West Side of Chicago in 1889. From these prototypes the movement spread to other U.S. cities and abroad through Europe and Asia.

The origins of modern social casework can be traced to the appointment of the first medical almoners in Britain in the 1880s, a practice quickly adopted in North American and most western European countries. The almoners originally performed three main functions: ascertaining the financial eligibility and resources of patients faced with the rising costs of medical care, providing counseling services to support patients and their families during periods of ill health and bereavement, and procuring adequate practical aids and other forms of home care for discharged patients. Elsewhere secular and religious charitable associations providing financial help, educational welfare, and housing for the poor began to employ social workers.

By the turn of the century there were various schemes for organizing charitable work on “scientific” principles according to nationally agreed standards of procedure and services. In Britain, the United States, Germany, and, later, Japan, leading charities worked in conjunction with poor-law and public assistance authorities, an approach endorsed in 1909 in the majority report of the British Royal Commission on the Poor Law. The first schools of social work, usually run by the voluntary charitable agencies, appeared in the 1890s and early 1900s in London, New York City, and Amsterdam, and by the 1920s there were similar ventures in other parts of western Europe and North America and in South America. The training programs combined casework methods and other practical forms of intervention and support, with particular emphasis on working in cooperation with individuals and families to restore a level of independence.

From the 1900s onward the surveys conducted by Charles Booth in London and Seebohm Rowntree in York and by other researchers began to transform conventional views of the role of the state in social welfare and the relief of poverty, and the social causes of poverty came under scrutiny. At the same time, the scope of social work was growing, with the spread of settlement houses, to include group work and community action.

In most countries social welfare services, or personal social services, rather than being separately organized and administered, are often attached to other major social services, such as social security, health care, education, and housing. This is explained by the course of their historical development. The means open to policy-making and administration in the personal social services are often incompatible. For example, the demands of the general integration and coordination of care programs can conflict with the provision of services that take due account of the needs of specific client groups. Also to be reconciled are the provision of individual services and the provision for family and neighbourhood needs.

Statutory and voluntary social services have evolved in response to needs that could not be fully met by individuals either alone or in association with others. Among the factors determining the present nature of such services are, first, that the growth in the scale and complexity of industrial societies has added to the obligations of central and local governments. Second, the increasing wealth and productivity of industrial societies has heightened public expectations regarding standards of living and standards of justice, at the same time augmenting the material capacity to meet those expectations. Third, the processes of social and economic change have grown to such proportions that individuals are increasingly ill-equipped to anticipate and cope with the adverse effects of such change. Fourth, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to recognize and provide for the idiosyncratic needs arising from the interaction of social and personal life.

Any family can experience crises that it is powerless to control. The hardships of ill health and unemployment can be compounded by loss of income; divorce and separation can impede the welfare and development of young children; and long-term responsibility for dependent relatives can impair the physical and emotional well-being of those who provide the care.

A very small number of families experience such intractable problems that they require almost continuous help from personal social services. Some of these families present problems of deviant behaviour, including family violence and child abuse, irregular attendance or nonenrollment in school, alcohol and drug abuse, and crime and delinquency. Not all poor families, however, make heavy demands on social welfare services; indeed considerable hardship could be alleviated through more efficient use of existing services.

Over time, social workers have acquired a special responsibility for people whose particular needs fall outside the aegis of other professions and agencies. Apart from the requirements of individuals and families with serious long-term social and emotional problems, personal social services meet a wide spectrum of needs arising from the more routine contingencies of living. Inevitably personal social services are primarily concerned with reacting to a crisis as it occurs, but today much effort is being invested in preventive work and in the enhancement of welfare in the wider community. In this respect comparison can be made with the traditional aim of social security—the reduction of poverty—and the more ambitious objective of income maintenance.

The organization of personal social services in different societies is extremely variable. Ethnicity and urban deprivation have added new dimensions to need that cut across the traditional client categories of families, children, youth, the sick and handicapped, the unemployed, the aged, and the delinquent. Nevertheless, there are continuities and consistencies in the pattern of needs that characterize these major client groups.