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Generalist Practice: A Task-Centered Approach, Second Edition resources

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task-centered and generalist practice 7 environments are in constant interaction and in a continual process of adaptation and accommodation that is mutually influencing. For our purpose, the most useful concept from this perspective is the ecomap, one version of which is illustrated in Figure 1.1. Other important con- cepts are habitat (the physical and social environment), niche (the place the system occupies), goodness-of-fit (the extent to which there is a har- mony between the system and the environment), stress (result of a mis- fit), and coping (strategies to ameliorate stress). Systems theory combines ideas from a number of fields including in- formation theory and biology. Like ecological theory, it stresses the im- portance of the relationship between people and their environments. For our purposes, its most salient contributions are the definition of a system and the concept of boundaries. A system is defined as a com- plex of elements that form an organized, interrelated whole. Two of the concepts that capture some of the organization of systems are hierar- chy and subsystems. Using a family system as an example, it is appar- ent that the family members are the elements that, taken together, form the whole or the unit. Boundaries are evident because we can define who is part of the system and who is not. Families exhibit a clear hier- archy, with parents expected to have more power than children. It is also apparent that the work of the family is carried out by subsystems, such as the marital, parental, and sibling subsystems. The division of power and labor and the number of subsystems are more complex in larger systems like organizations. The concept of boundaries is used to examine the amount of information exchanged between systems or subsystems. When boundaries are rigid, little information is ex- changed. When they are open, adequate amounts of information are exchanged. When they are porous, too much information is exchanged and one system can be overwhelmed by another. Other useful concepts include steady state and homeostasis (the tendency of systems to main- tain a dynamic equilibrium and the mechanisms for doing so) and equi- and multifinality (the relationship between means and ends). The fundamental contribution of an ecosystems perspective to task- centered generalist practice is that it expands our ability to recognize the possibilities and necessity to work with a variety of systems. The ecomap in Figure 1.1 is derived from ecological theory and can be used to analyze human situations within this perspective. Typically, however,

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