Non-directivity, community development and the Battens
Social work history in 20 bites
Selecting books influencing social work’s history
The next book I’m going to consider in Social work history in 20 books is the Battens’ (1967) The non-directive approach in group and community work. You’ll be wondering ‘why?’ Before introducing the book that represents the culmination of their approach, therefore, I will do a bit of explaining in this post.
You’ll know by now that I don’t take the books in this series of posts in date order of publication. And you can probably guess that I don’t know all the books I’m going to cover in the 20 that I’ve said I’m going to comment on (this is number 12, if you don’t remember). Selection is an ongoing process, and part of it is convenience: I have a lot of books on my shelves, although thousands fewer than I had a couple of years ago. What I’ve kept when passing on my library to others is part of the selection process.
Deciding on this book now is therefore partly a convenience; it comes right off my shelf. But I have chosen it for good historical, academic and professional reasons. Here they are.
There are a lot of 1960s and 1970s publications about community work. And fewer, but some, that explicitly combine it with groupwork; this book does. Moving on from Mary Parker Follett’s very early practice and theoretical contribution which sees group experience and community practice as connected, I wanted to keep the same connection.
A good deal of community work writing is necessarily about how you work with groups in communities, but it tends not to deal with the groupwork processes so explicitly as Mary Parker Follett did and as the Battens do. The Battens’ work is possibly the last to do it so directly: these two fields really bifurcate after this time. Groupwork has increasingly become more oriented to therapeutic and personal development processes, and community work increasingly about advocacy and social justice.
Written in the mid-late 1960s, and building on T. R. Batten’s several earlier works, it also represents the culmination of the colonial community development experience. It thus theorises decades of experience in the colonies, extracting and applying it in its own right as an experience of practice and explicitly to use it as the basis for a Western community work.
