Social work: ¿discipline or social technology? Some points of an epistemological order

Abstract

The beginnings of social work can well be considered as troublous and unstable in terms of its precision and theoretical-conceptual solidity, mainly due to the structural weakness with which it bursts onto the scene of the academic world framed in the social sciences. This situation in some way has contributed to the deepening of the epistemological debate on identifying it as social technology or visualizing it as a scientific field attached to the field of Social Sciences. Hence, it is interesting to observe that in the process of its historical construction, it is permeated by a strong heterogeneity that, like a pendulum, places it around two orientations: on the one hand research, and on the other, action as such.