Social Welfare Administration Theories

Definition of Social Administration

• Social administration focuses on policies, planning, and administration of goods and services in relation to political, social, and economic institutions and distribution of national resources to social welfare needs.

Objectives of Social Welfare Administration

• The major objective of social welfare administration is to enhance social functioning.
• Social welfare administration shares a common objective with social work as a profession.

Areas of Administrative Work and Responsibility

• Study and analyze the community.
• Determine agency purpose as basis for clientele selection or people to be served.
• Provide financial resources, budgeting, and accounting.
• Develop agency policies, programs, and procedures for implementation of agency purposes.
• Select and work with agency leadership, professional and nonprofessional staff, boards, committees, and service volunteers.
• Provide and maintain physical plant, equipment, and supplies.
• Develop a plan, establish and maintain effective community relations, and interpret programs.
• Keep complete and accurate records of agency operations and make regular reports.
• Plan and conduct research on a regular basis.
• Continuously conduct regular evaluation of program and personnel.

Concept of Administration

• Administration is the process of defining and attaining the objectives of the organization through a system of coordination and cooperative effort.

Formation of a Social Welfare Agency

• A social welfare agency comes into being when a group of people see an unmet need, want to meet that need, get community permission, and accept legal responsibility for using resources for the specific purpose.

Nature of Social Welfare Agencies

• Social welfare agencies are administrative bureaucracies established to attain specific goals.
• They are social systems that adaptively respond to external and internal pressures and generate informal patterns that may facilitate or hamper goal attainment.

Social Work Administration

• Social work administration is based on the principles and techniques of administration in general but addressed to specific social work tasks of defining and solving human problems and satisfying human needs.

Social Functioning

• Social functioning is a key concept in social work, focused on enhancing social functioning.

Systems Approach

• A system is a purposeful, organized interrelationship of components in which the performance of the whole exceeds the individual outputs of all the parts.
• A multiple system can be studied from a small view (microcosm) to a large view (macrocosm).