A POSTMODERN CRITIQUE OF THE SACSSP'S DRAFT CODE OF ETHICS

Abstract

In the course of the past few years, social work academics have begun increasingly to explore the relevance of postmernism for social work in South Africa, thus beginning to reconsider fundamentally some of its constituting components, including its moral, ethical and values base (Sevenhuijsen, 2003: Sewpaul & Hölscher, 2004; Williams & Sewpaul, 2004).  With regard to the latter, it appears that al least since Abraham Flexner's now famous 1915 assertions regardig the professional standing of social work, the profession has been at great pain to make its moral, ethical and value base, and thus its role and function in relation to broader society, explicit.  Flexner, in his paper entitled "Is Social Work a Profession?" presented at the 1915 National Conference of Charities and Corrections, defined the professions as those occupations that "...engage in intellectual operations involving individual responsibility, derive their material from science and learning, work this material up to a practical end, and apply it using techniques that are educationally communicable, are self-organised, and are motivated by altruism" (Popple, 1985:561, author's emphasis) and found that social work at the time did not qualify as a profession.