Epistemological Conditions for the Development of a Sociology of Social Work

This article aims to remove the epistemological obstacles to an understanding of the anthropological foundations of social work. Three main obstacles are studied here. The denial, by the critical perspective, of any autonomy whatsoever in social work, the trap of historicism, no longer involving the question of political autonomy but that of the autonomy of explanatory processes taking its specificity into account, mistrust, or even refusal, with regard to pre-established explanatory models and the opposition between the individual and the collective, intensifying that between subjectivity and objectivity. The analysis leads to new epistemological issues. They involve the conditions to be assembled for elaborating a sociology of social work that sets out to construct the identity and unity of its object. One of these issues relates to the production and status of knowledge furnishing the field of social work itself. The article pleads for a clinical sociology which, unlike the developments already in force, dissociates the axiological domain from the properly sociological domain. This "clinical sociology" cannot dispense with a "sociology of the clinical sociology practice", meaning an analysis of the researcher's involvement in an object he himself contributes to formalize sociologically. Adapted from the source document.