SOCIAL HELP AS A FUNCTIONAL SYSTEM IN SOC IETY

Social work and social help in modern society are open to serious doub ts with respect to their motives, their stigmatizing effects, and thei r efficiency. As long as their theoretical reflection chooses as its f ocus the distinction between conformity and deviance there seem to be scant chances to remedy these doubts either in theory or in practice. Therefore, this article tries to regard non-help, i.e. the hitherto '' tragic choice'' of social help, as the other side of a distinction, bo th sides of which, help and non-help, are the code of a functionally d ifferentiated subsystem of modem society. Distinguishing its function, its operational closure, and its codification of communications, the article describes the system of social help as a subsystem of society which uses the distinction between help and non-help in order to compe nsate for deficits. The system provides for the vicarious inclusion of people in society, paradoxically jeopardizing that very inclusion to the extent it succeeds in maintaining it vicariously. The article goes on to describe the difference between the functionally differentiated system, on the one hand, and organizations working in the environment of that system, on the other. The organizations use the equivalence w ithin the system and its neutrality in regard to deciding between the two values of its code for the introduction and competitive testing of programs that prove capable of deciding on help versus non-help. Fina lly, the proposal to discuss problems of social work and social help i n terms of a functionally differentiated subsystem of society is used to specify the systems reference of the intervention which help (or no n-help) are aiming at. This systems reference is that of the interveni ng system itself. Any success in the intervention process must be cred ited to pure chance. And that is the reason for the degree of freedom of the system to condition its own operations.