Few European countries have changed as much in recent decades as Spain. Until the 1950s, it was still a rural country with a low level of education, but it has since become an industrialized nation with a predominantly urban population. The democratization following Franco's death in 1975 ended Spain's anomaly and brought the country closer culturally and politically to other Western nations, after this had already occurred in social and economic terms. A clear expression of this rapprochement was Spain's accession to the European Community in 1986. The underlying question of the investigation is: What connections existed in Spain between processes of social modernization and the development of social work? This question assumes that modernization has taken place.