Research and Social Work: from the bourgeois to the ontologic perspective of social science

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to question the bourgeois concept of social sciences, to present a brief history of research in Social Work and to present the first steps of the 'ontologic perspective' as a theoretical-methodological reference, with a focus on the production of knowledge in the current academic world. The considerations warn that research and theoretical clarification for social assistants in the current situation become their principal means of work, because it is from the systematization of the social reality that the professional has the ability to act with greater security and to give possible responses that would be accepted by the social objectivity. The study begins by locating Social Work as a profession that has been guaranteeing its space in the realm of research, principally in relation to studies about expressions of social issues. Thus, it maintains that the objects of social science research emerge from a concrete reality and establish their mediations in a society that produces and reproduces by means of unreconcilable contradictions.