There is an irony in our resurrection of the social in social work. Mary Richmond, an early 20th-century social work pioneer, had in mind that social workers could make important contributions to social science. It is noteworthy that she quotes the sociologist Robert Park to argue that social workers might fill a gap which sociology had left open. Indeed, Richmond is widely seen as making a major contribution to the Chicago School of Sociology, with its emphasis on the ethnographic study of everyday lives. We would like to suggest that much may be gained by resuscitating the social dimensions of child protection practice, in order to nurture humane practice, through thorough understandings of the lives in the living, and also to inform with social science the ‘evidence base’ for policy and system design.

As we have noted previously, other areas of practice (than child protection) have much more clearly, in recent decades, highlighted the importance of the social and have been helpful to our thinking. In particular the ‘social model’ has challenged thinking across a range of fields, including disability and mental health. It has provided a philosophy and framework for articulating practices that challenge dominant biomedical models and their narrow focus on individual impairments, disease and risk. It has drawn attention to the economic, environmental and cultural barriers faced by people with differing levels of (dis)ability and built on a movement where those needing services were instrumental in articulating their rights to full participation in service design.

In this chapter we discuss the evolution of the social model in areas such as disability and mental health. In these domains, there has been a very clear ‘other’ to which the social model was responding – medicine and the notion of biological damage.