What’s in a Word? Culture

By Al Murdach, LCSW (retired)

This column explores the meanings behind words that are currently significant for social workers.  Today’s word is: “Culture.”

Social workers are currently bombarded with demands from the general public, employers, client groups, funders, academics, and social work authors that they must become more “culturally competent” in dealing with clients from various ethnicities and social backgrounds. It is often noted that our 21st Century American society is becoming increasingly diverse and pluralistic, and that this requires an openness by practitioners to deal flexibly and sensitively with a steadily increasing range of social perspectives among the clients they serve.

This situation is not totally new to social work. Early settlement workers, public health representatives, and charity organization staff visited the teeming tenements of urban metropolises throughout the country and encountered people from multiple ethnic groups and nationalities. Robert Hunter, an early social worker, wrote in his classic work on inequality in America, Poverty (1904), that “the poor are almost entirely foreign born. Great colonies, foreign in language, customs, habits, and institutions, are separated from each other and from the distinctly American groups on national and racial lines.” The economic and social disparities among such groups, and their alienation from the dominant white and Eurocentric aspects of “American” culture, seem sadly little changed today. What has changed, however, is the approach social work takes today to cultural diversity. Earlier social workers sought to “Americanize” people from different cultures, using the “melting pot” image of adjustment. Today we seek to celebrate “diversity” and cultivate an understanding of how people can maintain their cultural identities and still be part of the larger whole that is American society.

So what is “culture,” why is it important, and how does it impact social work practice now? Culture has been classically defined as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and other capabilities and habits acquired by people as members of a society.” It is important because culture is rooted deeply in all human interaction and therefore affects communication and understanding between different individuals and social groups. A “clash” of cultures can cause irrevocable harm or, conversely, can lead to healing and social benefit if handled with sensitivity. A sensitive understanding of different cultures is important to social work because practitioners are charged with achieving the goal of helping others by “starting where the client is” whether the client is an individual, a group, or an organization. And where the client “is,” or starts from, is often determined in large part by the client’s cultural background.

What cultures are we talking about? Recent issues of Social Work, the profession’s national journal, have mentioned the Latino culture, the black culture, inner city culture, Burmese culture, Muslim culture, Chinese culture and the culture of poverty. And this is only a partial list. Does this mean each practitioner will have to have a detailed knowledge of an endless series of cultures? Not really, but it does mean practitioners will have to develop their helping skills to accommodate cultural preferences and differences. After all, people do not seek out social work services because a practitioner is culturally sensitive. People seek social work services because the practitioner is a competent provider of a service, meaning a type of assistance that can help them with their problem(s). And the problems of people from different cultures are basically human problems and run the gamut familiar to all trained social workers: family issues, financial difficulties, legal problems, child rearing questions, the stress of caring for aging parents, housing issues, criminal justice difficulties, educational problems, etc., etc. The list goes on and on. Cultural awareness is not a service, but is important because it can shape the service offered so it can be more effectively used and understood by the client.