Social Security Advisory Board

Accuracy in measuring function related to one's ability to work is central to public confidence in a work disability benefits system. In the United States, national disability programs are challenged to adjudicate millions of work disability claims each year in a timely and accurate manner. The Work Disability Functional Assessment Battery (WD-FAB) was developed to provide work disability agencies and other interested parties a comprehensive and efficient approach to profiling a person's function related to their ability to work. The WD-FAB is grounded by the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health conceptual framework.

Over the past two decades, there have been three articles in different academic journals giving accounts of the role and remit of the Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC) and its contribution to policy making (Logie, 1989; Bett, 1994; Ogus, 1998). The aim of the present article is to describe SSAC’s current remit, role and activities, to examine how these have developed over its lifetime and to discuss SSAC’s contribution to policy making today.

Edwin H. Sutherland, Lippincott, Phila., 1924, Even without the author's aid, indeed, we see ample evidence, in all these five cases which Dr. Pettit presents, of an emerging methodology which increasing analysis and definition will find applicable to varying situations, the central problem of which is to gain the interest of numbers of people, or to afford them opportunity for participation in common activities. It is the same evidence which we find in the practical daily procedure of executives, not only of those agencies whose work is definitely to organize group activity, but equally of those individual service agencies who nevertheless must gather around them a group of individuals to bring assurance for the continued support of that service. It is a technique, moreover, as the author suggests, which has objectives and achievements in the development of individual personality quite apart from its more obvious objective purposes. In taking" Community Organization," however, as a title for a book in which is presented material out of which it is hoped a more adequate understanding of that technique will eventually come, Dr. Pettit has accepted the inheritance of a confused conception in his terminology. The community by traditional definition is merely one kind of a group-based upon geographical proximity. However weak the community ties may be as contrasted with the extra-territorial influences of religion, economics, or race, which create the special interest groups within the territorial association, there is certainly evidence that they exist. We are sure that Dr. Pettit and his associates do not intend to nominate this community grouping as the only kind of association from which evidence of organization method is to be drawn. In fact, neither the case of Athens where Henry Robinson tried to strengthen a local church; nor the case of Brocton with the organization vicissitudes of a neighborhood association; nor the case of Dale County and its contrasting efforts of two Red Cross workers; nor the record of Ferndale's ultimate reception to a young seminary student's effort to organize its leisure time; nor the account of Woodland, on whose community center an autopsy should have been performed in the first ten pages, are examples of an effort to organize community-wide activities. Yet the explanation that "the authors have considered community as measured by the number, kind, and intensity of interests people have in common rather than by the mere fact of their geographical proximity," is certainly debatable. The whole development of the community chest and council of social agencies-by reason of its widespread community soliciting and the inclusion of sharply conflicting group interests among its agencies-is based upon the hope, at least, of unifying ties in the local situations. There are other and better evidences outside the field of social work which make extremely questionable such a destruction by definition of the community as a group with special characteristics of its own. The processes and methods of organization are one thing, the constituent elements of the group, another. The past ten years have seen the technical content of "organization" grow apace. It is experience of conscious effort in working with many kinds of interest groups, and for many purposes, which has made that possible and it is that organization itself of which these cases are truly illustrative.