Organisations and Management in Social Work

Everyday Action for Change

Mark Hughes, Michael Wearing

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473998490
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

Providing a comprehensive and critical examination of the complex issues involved in the management and organisational contexts of social work practice, this book will help readers to:

- Critically evaluate organisational theory, managerial techniques and organisational structures.

- Develop strategies for ethical and reflective organisational practice.

- Understand how to plan and manage change in learning organisations.

- Unpick important themes such as leadership, supervision, risk, decision making, and accountability.

- Explore the potential for increasing service user and worker participation in organisations.

1 Social Work in Organisations

In this chapter we overview

• social workers as active participants in organisations;
• social work as a professional occupation;
• key players in human service organisations;
• labour market reform and managerialism;
• social work knowledge in organisational practice.

Introduction

Social work is a profession that is practised within the confines of an organisation and the tasks that social workers carry out are defined by the nature of this organisation. Thus, a social worker employed in a voluntary sector family centre may be engaged in more individual and family counselling work than a social worker in a hospital setting. Similarly, the knowledge that social workers use in their daily work may also vary: the family centre social worker may have specialist knowledge of particular therapeutic techniques, while the hospital social worker may have specialist knowledge of particular illnesses and their impact on individuals’ capacity to live independently. Some social workers may feel that they have little wider professional identity outside of their particular job role or simply that the nature of their job results in more identification with the organisation than with the profession.

Nonetheless, social work does have something unique to offer human service organisations. Our argument here is that social work is a socially active and engaged profession within organisations. We have an accumulated body of knowledge that helps us understand individuals and communities within their wider social and political contexts. We promote certain values and take political stances in order to defend these values. We apply our knowledge and values through our skills in critical thinking, research, policy development, counselling and networking. In this sense, social workers bring a unique awareness and capacity to organisational practice. We argue throughout this book that social work is an active, engaged and reflective profession that skilfully uses interpersonal communication, interaction, ethical and political tactics and change strategies to initiate and sustain positive social processes and outcomes for clients of human service organisations. In this sense, we see social workers as active rather than passive change agents, as engaged in decision making and taking risks rather than being ‘fence sitters’, and as motivated by their professional community of shared practices, knowledge and core values.

Negotiating the Ideals and Realities

If we conceptualise social work as incorporating knowledge, values and skills generated through professional education, socialisation and experience, it is possible to see that social work extends beyond the confines of a particular job or organisation. The challenge for social workers is negotiating the slippage between the potential or the ideals of social work as a professional activity and the reality of social work as organisational work (Lymbery and Butler, 2004).

The work environment will always limit the potential of social work. There is no one job that can facilitate the meeting of all the profession’s aims and aspirations. With social work skills, the potential of ‘I can do this’ can easily slip into ‘I do this’, as the capacity to exercise a wide range of skills is undermined by the lack of opportunities to practise these in daily work. Similarly, the confidence of ‘I know this’ can be reduced to ‘I know this to do this job’. Even more challenging is the slip from ‘I believe this’ to ‘I believe this to do this job’. This results in social work losing its distinctiveness and its purpose – ‘social work without a soul’ – and may result in external political and economic agendas – such as neo-liberalism and managerialism – determining a social worker’s role.

It is social work’s values and, in particular, its commitment to social justice which set it apart from other occupations. While it is recognised that there are different interpretations of what social justice means, typically practitioners point to equality and fairness as being important (O’Brien, 2011). According to Bisman (2004: 115):

Without this emphasis on social justice, there is little if any need for social work or social workers. … [I]n practice, social workers draw from the same knowledge base in human behaviour and social systems as do psychiatrists and city planners. It is the application of knowledge and skills towards moral ends that imbues the profession with meaning and defines the role of the social worker in society.

These values are not exhaustive. We would include alongside social justice, core values such as respect for others, especially those marked as disadvantaged, different or marginalised, and self-determination for our clients (see Chapter 9). It is understandable, then, that social workers may experience tension and uncertainty in the gap between what they know and believe and what they do in their day-to-day work. Similarly, they may fear the reduction of what they know and believe to only what they need to know and believe in order to do the job. Later in this chapter, we explore this tension in relation to debates about evidence-based and best practice.

For some social workers, this sense that their professional identity is limited by their organisational role comes as a surprise. Their social work education had been not just about instilling in them the skills, knowledge and values of social work, but also about socialising them into the profession. That they are not able to fulfil all of the potential of their professional identity in the organisation that now employs them challenges many people and may lead them to question the adequacy of their education to prepare them for organisational life. The newly qualified worker is confronted with the following questions:

• How is what I do different from what other employees do?
• What contribution does social work make to the organisation and to its service users?
• How do I apply my social work knowledge, values and skills to the work of the organisation?
• What happens when organisational practices conflict with my social work values?
• Should I seek to influence the organisation in line with social work values, and, if so, how should I go about this?
• How can I survive, maintain competency and integrity, and flourish, as a social worker and as a person, in this organisation?

For many social workers, the challenges of organisational practice are managed by engaging (and re-engaging) with the profession, its knowledge, values and skills. Importantly, this should not be an abstract enterprise or one that solely helps manage the stress of social work, but rather it should facilitate the reformulation of the self in relation to an unfolding professional identity. In this context, self-care would not be an isolated process but directed towards improving practice (Miehls and Moffat, 2000: 346). Central to this would be developing a greater sense of integrity as a person, and as a professional and organisational operator. For Banks (2010: 2181–2), this involves:

A commitment to a set of values, the context of which relates to what it means to be a ‘good person in a professional role’ and/or a ‘good professional’.

An awareness that the values are interrelated to each other and form a coherent whole and that their interrelationship is what constitutes the overarching goals or purpose of the profession.

A capacity to make sense of professional values and their relationship to the practitioner’s own personally held values.

The ability to give a coherent account of beliefs and actions.

Strength of purpose and ability to implement these values [emphasis in original].

There may be organisational systems and supports to enable you to do this. For example, newly qualified social workers may be directly responsible to a social work educated supervisor, who, in addition to providing advice on the handling of specific cases, may also assist in integrating professional learning and personal practice, spending time helping workers to acknowledge the dilemmas of practice. While other supports, such as mentoring schemes and seminar groups, may be found within the organisation, it is likely that many social workers will need to look for these beyond the organisation so that they can continue to explore their emerging identity as a social worker. Many social workers engage in ongoing professional development activities run by the professional associations, post-qualifying consortia and universities. While, for some, these activities are the first to go when things get really busy, their benefits in facilitating reflexivity and an integrated social work identity should not be underestimated.

For individual social workers, the challenge is to ‘work critically within the world as it is while seeking change, and to work within agencies as they are while being able to promote positive change’ (Hugman, 2001: 329, our emphasis). For us, this is fundamental to critical, ethical and reflective practice within human service organisations: to be able to stand both inside and outside the organisation, and, using this knowledge, to work strategically to change the organisation. We must recognise and engage with management and professional agendas in organisations, but we must also be critical of them, consider their impact on service users and their social and political situations, and seek to alleviate this impact. In Practice Example 1.1, a social worker seeks to engage with and extend her professional identity.

Practice Example 1.1

An unfolding social work identity

Christiana is a newly qualified social worker employed in an intake team of a statutory child protection agency. During her social work studies, Christiana became very interested in anti-racist and critical reflective practice. She is of African heritage, having left Sierra Leone in the mid-1990s following the civil war in that country. She lives in a city with an increasing African refugee community, with many people arriving from Sudan in recent years. There have been some negative media reports about this increasing group in the population – both in terms of perceived pressures on health and social services, and in relation to ‘gangs’ of young African people roaming the streets at night.

In reflecting with her supervisor on her first year in the job, Christiana described having gone through a ‘culture shock’. She explained this in a few ways. The first culture shock related to her experience commencing with the child protection team – everyone was very busy, it was difficult to see work though to a meaningful end on the intake team and child protection notifications and high-risk situations took priority, while preventative work seemed minimal. Christiana didn’t have a child protection placement during her degree so she felt quite unprepared for working in this setting. A second culture shock related to working with so many people who do not come from a social work background and who do not seem to share the same perspective on social justice (or even the same language about social justice) that she does. Another culture shock related to the disproportionate number of African families the organisation is responding to, and about whom child protection notifications have been received. Together with the negative media reporting, she has become increasingly concerned about the unfair ways her own African culture and heritage are being represented in the agency and society more broadly.

As she expressed to her supervisor, Christiana has been left wondering what it is she does as a social worker that makes a difference in people’s lives, how she manages the authority in her statutory role with her commitment to social justice and empowerment, and how to work collaboratively with people who don’t share the same professional values. In conversation, Christiana’s supervisor helped her recognise that not all of the potential of social work as a profession can be realised in one job, but that nonetheless there are ways that her commitment to anti-racism and social justice can be put into practice in her work. These include supporting her colleagues to challenge the negative attitudes of other staff and community members towards African people, doing some background research on some of the reasons why African migrants may become over-represented in child protection notifications, and encouraging local community groups to develop strategies to address these factors. She has increasingly recognised that not all of this can be done in her regular job and so she has engaged with the local branch of her professional association to work on these issues, including writing a submission and discussion papers on the needs of African refugee communities. While these initiatives have raised questions for her – including a feeling of discomfort in being seen as an ‘expert’ on issues for African people – in recent months she has felt more in control of her work (both inside and outside the organisation) and how this connects with her emerging social work identity.

The Nature of Social Work Organisations

We speak and hear of them so often that it seems strange to ask: what are organisations? They feel like a real and solid presence in many aspects of our lives, from sporting to educational organisations, from retail to government organisations. However, if we strip away the bricks and mortar – which really are simply containers for organisations – then we can begin to uncover the complex web of human relationships and interactions that comprise them. How we come to understand these relationships and interactions has been shaped by a wide range of theoretical ideas. Thus, different conceptualisations or definitions of organisations emerge from different theoretical perspectives and traditions. We overview some of these theories in Chapter 2 and discuss their implications for understanding and analysing organisations. However, at this point it is useful to identify two alternative ways of defining organisations.

The first and most common definition of organisations emphasises their rationality and goal-directed nature. There is a sense that people come together to pursue a common purpose and create structures and processes that are best suited to achieving that purpose. According to Etzioni (1969: 3), ‘organisations are social units (or human groupings) deliberately constructed and reconstructed to seek specific goals’. Forming an organisation and working together is thus seen as more efficient than working separately to achieve the agreed goals. Working together as an organisation involves creating structures and technologies that are suited to the pursuit of these goals. For many, the rise of the modern organisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries embodies the ‘inexorable advance of reason, liberation and justice and the eventual eradication of ignorance, coercion and poverty’ (Reed, 1999: 25).

An alternative to this modernist and functionalist definition of organisations derives from a range of social constructionist, critical and postmodern ideas, and emphasises not the rationality of organisations but their irrationality, or, at least, their frequent irrationality. While organisations are often intended to be rational and goal directed, the people within them often act in contradictory ways. At the centre lies the exercise of power through the creation of structures, technologies and language, meeting a wide range of human needs which are frequently unrelated to the formal or espoused goals of the organisation. Casey (2004: 303), in summarising the trajectory of critical and postmodern views of organisations, identifies organisations as ‘sites of action’ and as comprising ‘contested and negotiated rationalities’. For Chia (1996: 150), organisations are ‘loosely emergent sets of organizing rules which orient interactional behavior in particular ways’. Thus, those operating from this position are actually not so much interested in defining or theorising organisations (as completed entities) as they are in defining and theorising the processes of organising.

The agencies social workers work in are commonly referred to as ‘human service organisations’. This term signifies their purpose to be the production of services to meet human needs, rather than the production of material goods. Garrow and Hasenfeld (2010) go further than this, however. They claim that human service organisations ‘engage in moral work, upholding and reinforcing moral values about “desirable” human behavior and the “good” society’ (2010: 33). The legitimacy human service organisations have in working with people is gained from their wider institutional environment and social policy arrangements. However, their outcomes and effectiveness are more determined by the everyday small-scale interactions between service users and workers (Garrow and Hasenfeld, 2010). We agree wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• Sidebar List
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Social Work in Organisations
• 2 Theorising Organisations
• 3 Organisational Change
• 4 Communicating and Collaborating
• 5 Decision Making and Risk
• 6 Leadership and Supervision
• 7 Accountability and Participation
• 8 Experiencing Organisations
• 9 Active and Ethical Practice
• References
• Index