Professional Practice in Human Service Organisations

A practical guide for human service workers

Catherine McDonald, Christine Craik, Linette Hawkins, Judy Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000246919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Helping children, disabled people, the unemployed, the elderly or homeless people can be inspiring work. However you can only help other people effectively if you understand your role clearly and know how to navigate the organisation in which you work. Professional Practice in Human Service Organisations examines what it means to be a professional in human service work, and how to develop excellence in professional practice. Making explicit what is often held as tacit knowledge in day to day practice, the authors explain the dynamics of human service organisations. They outline the challenges worker can face in caring for vulnerable people while at the same time fulfilling expectations of management and funding bodies. They explain the importance of understanding the complex networks of service delivery systems, including the role of information technology. They also examine how workers can maintain professional relations with clients, colleagues and other workers by developing skills in advocacy and in handling conflict, complaints and ethical dilemmas. Professional Practice in Human Service Organisations is essential reading for practitioners new to roles in social work, community work, youth work and related fields.

CHAPTER ONE
Understanding organisations

SUMMARY

This chapter is designed to assist students and new workers to understand the nature, dynamics and functioning of human service organisations. After establishing why the context of organisations is important to the conduct of human service work, we explore key concepts related to organisations and key challenges of working in organisations, particularly but not wholly emerging from the contemporary context. Finally, the chapter discusses a number of important issues involved in being an employee, and hence being managed, before briefly discussing several issues related to managing ourselves.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT

While everyone has some experience of organisations—for example, through attending school or university—most of us take them very much for granted. We rarely stop to consider the implications of an organisation for the range of people—for example, staff and service users—engaging with it. This is a very important issue for human service workers because the organisational context itself shapes how workers undertake their work, and ultimately the impact of their work on disadvantaged or troubled service users who are often heavily dependent on the organisation to which they have come for help. Think, for example, about the relationship that a person who has been homeless has with an emergency housing service, or that a person with a psychiatric disability has with a mental health service. It is also very important to remember that most pe ople who become service users of human service organisations do so because they have little choice. As a consequence, how the organisation functions—especially at the front line—is important not only for ourselves as workers, but also for the people we want to assist.

Unlike many other forms of work, such as that done by builders, plumbers or electricians, human service work is nearly always undertaken in organisational contexts. These contexts are not uniform, however—they range from huge state-based bureaucracies to small non-profit or community-based organisations—each with its own unique sets of issues and experiences. While professions such as social work that operate within the human services field draw their legitimacy from their profession, they also draw it—perhaps even more so—from their employing organisation. Very often, those organisations (particularly if they are operated by a government) are established by statute and have an associated body of legislation that sets out their purpose and their powers. A human service worker working for a state government child protection service, for example, has quite significant powers in relation to children considered to be at risk, and a social worker working for Centrelink has substantial power in determining the eligibility of young people for income security.

Many newly graduated professionals have been taught the notion that they retain significant professional autonomy. This is not entirely true and, as we will discuss later, it is even less true in the contemporary context than it was 30 years ago. Organisations largely create the rules of the game—for example, the actual intervention practices a worker might undertake, as well as the specific duties and responsibilities of employees. Being employed in an organisation inevitably means being subordinate to someone, and for beginning workers it often means working in a position a long way down a daunting hierarchy. These positions imply that employees have to obey sets of rules established by the organisation. It is also important to reflect that employees draw the means of daily sustenance from their employers in the form of their salaries; furthermore, they spend a considerable part of their lives within the organisation.

Mostly, organisations operate in physical locations, demarcated from the surrounding community in which they are embedded by such devices as buildings, doors and counters. Some human service organisations deploy degrees of security rarely seen or experienced in other contexts, and in doing so they send clear messages to both their staff and their service users. Finally, organisations grant identities to their employees, often represented and projected via physical means such as ID cards, name badges or corporate clothing. In all, human service organisations are significant contexts for human services practice, and all human service workers need to develop the capacity to understand the contexts within which they ply their skills, and the implications for their practice.

Non-profit organisation: An organisation that may not legally redistribute any surplus money it makes to individual shareholders. Any such surplus must be reinvested in the legally accepted goals and activities of the organisation.

Statute: An act passed by a parliament or other legislature that is formally recorded.

Professional autonomy: The rights of some professions, individually and collectively, to manage and govern their own work.

KEY CONCEPTS IN HUMAN SERVICE ORGANISATIONS

Distinguishing characteristics of human service organisations

It is generally accepted by key theorists that human service organisations are somewhat different from other organisations (see Hasenfeld, 1983 for a seminal account). Jones and May (1992) suggest that this group of organisations can (more or less) be distinguished by their purpose, their technology and their auspice. We begin with purpose. Usually, human service organisations are contrasted with for-profit organisations engaged in production or business. The primary purpose of that latter group, it is suggested, is to produce profit for owners and shareholders. For the most part (though there are exceptions, and these are growing in number), human service organ-isations nominate as their primary purpose the promotion of the care and wellbeing of people experiencing difficulties in their lives because of poverty, disability, illness or some other life hazard. While this might seem straightforward, distinguishing a human service organisation by purpose can have its difficulties, especially in what is known as a mixed economy of welfare. By this, we mean the entire range of organisations caught up in the over-arching business of the welfare state (a term characterising and describing the activities of those advanced industrialised countries that have actively promoted and provided many forms of welfare since the end of World War II). In Australia, for example, these can be public sector organisations, non-profit organisations or businesses. Consider the employment services sector, where a number of businesses such as Sarina Russo and Maximus are contracted by the Commonwealth government to provide services to the unemployed. Clearly, these organisations could claim that their purpose is to help the unemployed. However, their other very important purpose is to make a profit for their owners and shareholders. Other examples include businesses providing nursing home care and child care. Some of these are very controversial—such as boarding or rooming houses—because the poor conditions often found in them illustrate only too well that the main purpose is profit generation, often to the detriment of their hapless residents.

Another means of distinguishing human service organisations is through the ‘technologies’ they employ. ‘Technology’ here is really a metaphor for the types of activities and interventions deployed—for example, counselling or emergency relief. Hasenfeld (1983) is one of the main theorists suggesting this. He argues that we can distinguish between people-processing, people-sustaining and people-changing organisations. People-processing technologies are found in those organisations that assess people and provide a particular label, which then causes them to be treated in specific ways. In the Australian context, one of the main people-processing organisations is Centrelink. Clearly, when a person goes to a Centrelink customer-service office, his or her status is assessed and labelled as unemployed, sole parent, disabled or aged. Each of these categories attracts a particular payment with specific conditions attached to it. Hasenfeld originally thought that such organisations were not particularly interested in changing the attributes of their service users, a view he expressed in an era before ‘welfare reform’ (a development in policy by which income security payments became conditional on recipients behaving in required ways). Increasingly, and certainly in the case of Centrelink, the conditions attached to payments for unemployment require certain activities, which it is believed will change the dispositions of the unemployed from passive beneficiaries to active job-seekers.

People-sustaining organisations are those that provide some sort of service which allows people to live their lives, but which again is not interested in changing them. Some examples of these are aged care (for example, in-home care that is designed to allow people to ‘age in place’ or stay in their own homes), child care and many disability-support services.

In-home care: Domestic support or care services provided to the aged in their own homes.

Age in place: A principle of good practice in aged care that suggests people are happier in their own homes than in institutional settings.

Finally, people-changing organisations are those that are specifically set up to change the dispositions or personal attributes of the people who engage with them. There are many examples of these, including counselling services, educational services, family-support services and child-protection services. Jones and May (1992) argue that there is a fourth type of human service organisation: people-controlling organisations—the main purpose of which is control or restraint. Examples of these are corrective services and some mental health services (e.g. psychiatric hospitals).

The third feature said to characterise distinctiveness in human service organisations is auspice. By auspice, we mean the mandate or mechanism that authori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Understanding organisations
• CHAPTER TWO Leadership in human service organisations
• CHAPTER THREE Scoping the context
• CHAPTER FOUR Recording and report-writing
• CHAPTER FIVE Information development and management in human service organisations
• CHAPTER SIX Building and maintaining professional relations
• CHAPTER SEVEN Supervision and support
• CHAPTER EIGHT Managing conflict
• CHAPTER NINE Power and advocacy
• CHAPTER TEN Administrative ethics in human service organisations
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Preparing for and dealing with complaints
• CHAPTER TWELVE Professional ethics and ethical reasoning
• References
• Index