Path Dependence and the Place of Social Action in Social Work Practice
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper interprets the state of social work practice through the use of path dependence theory, which models the notion that history matters, and has been developed by economists to explain, among other things, why less desirable technologies are often adopted even when better ones are known to exist. The theory sheds light on the fact that a professional paradigm can become a dominant one, and that a profession can be “locked into” that paradigm even though others more suitable to its values and goals are known. One of the major mechanisms which brings this about, that of increasing returns, is explored. A brief historical perspective of social work, including social work with groups, is presented in light of the theory. This paper then establishes theoretical foundations for a practice that incorporates social action. Practice illustrations are presented. The paper argues that integrating social action in everyday practice does not require a revolutionary shift, but strategies that build on existing knowledge and skills.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it