“The Power of Place”: Another Look at the Environment

Abstract

The profession of social work has long claimed its niche as that space where the traffic between the environment and individuals, families, and groups occurs. Person-environment is a code for this transactional space. The reign of the ecological/systems model of understanding and practice, and that staple of curriculum, human behavior and the social environment, all stake out in one way or another this conceptual and practical habitat for the profession. It is, in fact, one of the distinguishing marks of the helping that social workers do—that we always and ever must understand human problems, suffering, possibility, capacities, and need in terms of their context; we must understand how the environment promotes challenges and offers resources; and we must understand how the individual or family interacts with those factors. But there is a sense of the environment that social work has, to a significant degree, ignored—that is, the immediate, proximal, often small environment where people play out much of t...