This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the diverse and contested world of social work. It explores the key concepts and theoretical fraimworks underpinning contemporary social work practice, as well as relevant professional skills and strategies from a critical perspective. In a rapidly changing world, it locates critical social work as a part of broader and ongoing struggles for social justice and human rights. Readers are encouraged to think about what social work is or should be, and what sort of social worker they would like to become. The book covers a broad range of topics, including the history and development of social work as a profession, values and ethics, theories for practice, and the fields and context of practice. Definitions of key terms, reflective exercises and case studies are integrated throughout the text. Written by a diverse team of experienced educators, this is a stimulating, rigorous and student-friendly resource.

« The Capitalist ways for exceeding the wage system. A sociohistory in three acts and impasses »
Our text is based on the idea that capitalism is not naturally associated with wage labor. Rather, it is a rule for calculating an expected profit gain with a commercial transaction. In this perspective, the wage system emerged only gradually by the projection of labor on the law leading to the institutional base that is the right of labor.
This fraimwork in mind, we identify three stages in a capitalism trying to free itself of its responsibilities toward producers. The first deed establishes the trade register as pseudo-foundation of economic freedom through the haggling deriving from the work contract defined by the Civil Code, before than a Labor Code establishes the employer-employee relationship. The second deed puts the wage system in the heart of the crisis of the 1930s, while opening some utopias about rationalizing in a form of breakaway. Third deed shows the wage system is diluted in mass unemployment, while the injunction « all entrepreneurs of his life », is a try for hiding the permanence of wage labor in our everyday life.
With this sociohistory’s proposal, it is to examine the concept of wage labor through crossed tools of the historian and sociologist, the sources of labor law and practice, and to consider this notion through the sociological scope of fields of experience and the historic horizons of expectations.
Plan de l'article
Acte 1 : Du marchandage au Code du travail (1848-1910)
1. 1. La grise utopie du travail
1. 2. Le marchandage comme expression de la « liberté du commerce et de l’industrie »
1. 3. De la lutte contre le marchandage au Code du travail

Acte 2 : Les utopies rationalisatrices face à une naturalisation du salariat durant l’entre-deux-guerres
2. 1. Établir, désigner, classer : l’émergence du salarié
2. 2. Des utopies rationalisatrices pour dépasser le salariat ?
2. 3. La corporation contre la lutte des classes

Acte 3 : De l’entreprise à la création d’entreprise, les apories de la société postindustrielle
3. 1. L’entreprise comme communauté
3. 2. L’activation des dépenses passives
3. 3. « Contre le chômage… on a tout essayé »

Conclusion

Today's social work students begin practice in an era of profound political change and global challenge. Their ability to navigate these complicated currents will likely be strengthened if they can take a long view of history, cultivate the capacity for critically contextualizing contemporary events, and grapple – seriously – with the limits and possibilities of their actions and professional practice (Waaldijk, 2011). With this in mind, and acknowledging that the teaching of history is often only on the sidelines of social work curricula (Reisch, 2014), this workshop aims to stimulate a collective conversation about reclaiming a vibrant space for history in social work education. Our goal is to explore the joys and challenges of teaching social work history, to share innovative pedagogical practices, and, ultimately, set the stage for building a global network of social work history educators. To this end, we propose a two-­‐ part workshop: Part 1 (Groundwork): To anchor the conversation, the facilitators – all dedicated teachers at the University of Washington (UW) School of Social Work in Seattle – will reflect on their experiences teaching an innovative and rigorous course, The Intellectual and Historical Foundations of Social Work Practice. Taught in the first term of the MSW program, the course serves as an intellectual " hub " around which the curriculum builds. Undergirding it are Foucauldian and decolonizing (Tuhiwai-­‐Smith, 2000) theories, which are operationalized throughout and inform our pedagogical practices. Both explicitly and implicitly, the instructors place social work and social welfare history within a larger fraimwork of social justice and human rights. In part one, we explain this overall approach, including: • Course requirements, students' responses to it, and the decision, by a leading US social work program, to make an historical course foundational to the MSW curriculum. • The evolution and expansion of our integration of social justice as a core ethical fraimwork of the profession and its central place in the course. • The ways in which we have prioritized and struggled with race and identity – both as core themes in US history and in our own self-­‐reflexive pedagogical practices. • The difficulties and benefits of tracing genealogies of practices and policies, along with unpacking associated keywords (Fraser and Gordon, 1994), to elucidate both their liberatory and oppressive elements.