A theme throughout the evolution of social work as a profession is one of structural and organizational diversity. The profession continues to engage its effort to forge an integration of several large constituencies of practitioners and educators. The struggle to establish a unified voice for the profession reflects a century long organizational history marked by divergent voices and forces. While the medical profession, the historical professional template for social work's founding members, and the discipline of psychology, maturing social work's historical clinical template, have both managed to create powerful organizational bases via the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Psychological Association (APA), social work is still struggling to find a similar coherent organizational structure that embraces the diversity of interests under the notion of social work as one profession.

This article will provide an historical overview of the professional and educational organizational evolution of social work in the United States. The history chronicled here reflects a constant motif of approach/avoidance as the profession began to emerge in the late 1800s, struggling to assert itself as a definable new profession through the first half of the 20th century, equal to medicine, law, and other emerging occupational categories.