There is a provocation at the heart of our 2022 paper, The Poetry of Social Work, that we think deserves a wider audience: the disciplines that most shape how people survive and flourish in society — social work, community development, human services, have spent the better part of a century trying to look like hard science. We argue that this has been a category error. Social work does not need to prove itself by the standards of physics or medicine. It needs to be understood on its own terms. And those terms, we suggest, have far more in common with poetry than with pathology reports.
The Flexner Problem
In 1915, Abraham Flexner asked a pointed question at the National Conference of Charities and Corrections: Is social work a profession? His implicit answer was no — not yet, not by the standards of medicine or law. The profession has been responding to that challenge ever since, building credentials, registering practitioners, constructing ever more elaborate taxonomies of practice.
We do not dismiss that project. But we think it has come at a cost. In the rush to be legible to the academy, to government funders, and to allied health systems, something essential has been pushed aside: the irreducibly interpretive, relational, and meaning-making nature of what social workers actually do.
A doctor diagnoses and prescribes. A social worker — in any meaningful sense — listens, senses, connects, and creates conditions for agency. These are not the same cognitive operations, and they do not benefit from the same epistemological scaffolding.
Enter POETRY
To give this argument some structure, we propose a framework built around the word POETRY — not as metaphor alone, but as a working map of the field:
- P — Professional practice: the organised body of knowledge, skills, and ethics that define what social workers do
- O — Ontology and outcomes: the deep questions of what is real, what matters, and what constitutes meaningful change in a person’s life
- E — Epistemology and ecology: how we know what we know, and the systemic context in which people are embedded
- T — Teleology and techniques: the purposes that animate practice, and the methods through which they are pursued
- R — Relationships and responsibilities: the connective tissue of all social work — trust, reciprocity, obligation, care
- Y — You / Your place and potential: the practitioner as a situated, reflective agent, not a neutral instrument
These six dimensions are not steps in a process. They are simultaneous orientations — ways of attending to a situation that must be held together rather than applied in sequence. Like the elements of a poem, they create meaning through their interaction.
A.R.M.S.: An Advanced Relational Meaning System
Underlying the POETRY framework is a more fundamental proposition: that human consciousness and the capacity to cope are not reducible to cognitive information processing alone. They require what we call an Advanced Relational Meaning System — A.R.M.S.
A.R.M.S. integrates three dimensions that most professional frameworks treat separately:
- Matter-energy flows — the physical, biological, and environmental conditions of life
- Information processing — the cognitive and perceptual systems through which people make sense of their situation
- Social construction of reality — the shared meanings, narratives, and relationships through which people locate themselves in the world
Social work, at its best, operates across all three simultaneously. A practitioner working with a family in housing crisis is not just managing information about policy eligibility. They are engaging with the material reality of cold rooms and unpaid bills, the cognitive state of a parent under chronic stress, and the meaning-making of a household trying to maintain dignity and coherence in the face of systemic pressure.
A framework that cannot hold all three of these dimensions at once is too small for the work.
Why Living Systems Theory Matters Here
Our argument draws on James Grier Miller’s Living Systems Theory — one of the most ambitious attempts in twentieth-century science to describe the organising principles common to all living entities, from cells to societies. For Miller, all living systems are characterised by their capacity to process matter, energy, and information in order to maintain viability and pursue purposes.
What this gives us, translated into the language of social work, is a way of understanding coping not as a psychological trait but as a systemic capacity — one that can be supported or undermined by conditions at every level, from the neurological to the cultural. When a person cannot cope, it is rarely because of a single failure in a single system. It is because the interlocking processes through which matter, energy, and information are processed have broken down at multiple points simultaneously.
This is why reductionist interventions — however well-designed — so often fail to hold. You cannot fix information processing in a person whose material conditions are destroying their capacity to regulate affect. You cannot build social meaning where relationships have been severed. The systems are interdependent, and they require an interdependent response.
The Personality Dimension
One of the less obvious contributions of our paper is the attention we give to personality typology — specifically the work of Carl Jung as extended through Nardi’s research on EEG signatures and neocortical activation, and John Beebe’s model of psychological types and decision-making.
Why does personality matter for social work? Because the practitioner and the person being served are both bringing a particular cognitive and relational style to every interaction. The same presenting problem will be experienced and expressed very differently by different personality types. The same intervention will land differently depending on the cognitive orientation of the person receiving it.
Incorporating Jung’s typological architecture into social work practice does not mean reducing people to categories. It means developing a more nuanced attentiveness to how different people process experience, construct meaning, and engage with change — attentiveness that is, in our view, the foundation of genuinely responsive practice.
Social Work as the Work That Makes Societies Work
We want to close with a proposition that one of us has been developing for several decades: social work is not best understood as a helping profession. It is better understood as the work that makes societies work — the connective tissue between individuals, families, communities, and the systems that are supposed to serve them.
When that connective tissue is healthy, people can navigate difficulty, access resources, build meaning, and participate in their communities. When it is damaged — by underfunding, by bureaucratisation, by the subordination of relational practice to compliance frameworks — the consequences are not just felt by the individuals who fall through the gaps. They ripple through the whole social fabric.
The implications for how we train, resource, and evaluate social workers are significant. If the work is fundamentally poetic — meaning-making, relational, interpretive, context-sensitive — then the metrics we use to assess it need to be capable of holding that complexity. Throughput measures and standardised outcomes will always miss what matters most.
We are not arguing against accountability. We are arguing for a more sophisticated understanding of what there is to account for.
Read the Full Paper
Benjamin, C., Bitetto, P., & Sharma, V. (2022). The Poetry of Social Work. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 10, 304–327. DOI: 10.4236/jss.2022.1012021