Editor’s Note: This post is brought to you by Annette R. Smith, and is taken from her 2007 book The Social World of Alcoholics Anonymous: How It Works. Smith received her masters in social work from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, and her Ph.D. from UC San Diego in 1991. She worked for several years as a psychiatric social worker at Napa State Hospital in California, where she helped develop an innovative co-educational unit for treating alcoholics, who had long been merely warehoused in those giant institutions. As one of the key elements in this new approach, she worked with the local A.A. Hospital and Institutions Committee in bringing A.A. to the inpatients in that program. This experience began her lifetime association with the fellowship. The Social World of Alcoholics Anonymous asserts the value of viewing AA as a social world, and argues that the success of AA is dependent on integration into the social world. Enjoy!
After several years working as a clinical social worker and program manager in the alcoholism treatment field, and being involved as an associate of Alcoholics Anonymous, I returned to school to obtain a doctorate in sociology. As I became more aware of sociological constructs, it became clear to me that although there was considerable literature on the history and philosophy of AA, its value as treatment, its bases of affiliation and the experiences of its members, AA as a social organization and the impact of that organization upon recovery, had not been widely examined.