The Social Work Business

John Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415224871
• eBook ISBN: 9781134590551
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Social work has become a business. The traditional distinction drawn between social work as a non-commercial activity in the public and voluntary sectors of the welfare state and private commercial activities driven by the market's profit motive has largely disappeared. In The Social Work Business John Harris addresses the introduction and consolidation of business thinking and ways of operating in social work and considers the consequences for service users, carers, voluntary organisations and social workers.

The book traces the development of the social work business from its establishment under Thatcherism to its modernisation under New Labour. It looks in detail at the use of capitalist sector methods - the heightened use of surveillance, the increase in managerial control, changes in work practices - and how this is being reflected in social work education.

The Social Work Business provides a radical reappraisal of the far-reaching changes the profession has undergone. The sources of uneasiness experienced by many social workers, faced with a transformation in the organisational culture in which they work, are thrown into sharp relief and opened up for debate.

1 Doing the business

Reminiscing

In 1975, I sat with my social worker colleagues in our regular team meeting as the Team Leader summarised the contents of a memorandum from the Director of Social Services. It announced that team leaders were to become ‘District Managers’, with increased responsibilities for a wider range of services and with more managerial authority. Team members exchanged puzzled and quizzical glances. Most of us were amused by this strange term, which didn’t seem to fit with the social work ethos in which we worked. There were suppressed giggles around the room. I said that I had come across this job title before, when I was still at school and was working for a men’s tailoring chain on Saturdays. We had a district manager then, I recalled, who used to visit us once a month to check whether our profit levels were higher than in the comparable month of the previous year. I predicted confidently that a job title used in the commercial world of men’s tailoring would never catch on in social work. There were approving nods and grunts of assent all round. We moved on dismissively to the next item on the agenda. (Five years later, I was a district manager.)

This brief reminiscence is the historical starting point for the book. It was my first encounter with the suggestion that social work had things to learn from the business world. Up to that point, during my time as a social work student and throughout my work following qualification, a clear distinction was drawn between social work as a non-commercial activity in the public and voluntary sectors and private commercial activities, driven by the market’s profit motive. As time has gone by, this distinction has been eroded to such an extent that what we now have in existence is, I would argue, ‘the social work business’. This business has distinctive aspects, just as other businesses do: for example, the business of supermarkets is obviously different from the business of car production. However, the central argument of the book is that so much of social work’s ideology and management is derived from an overarching business discourse, shared by businesses of vastly different hues, that ‘the social work business’ is now an appropriate designation. (One of the private sector’s social care trade papers is called, without a trace of irony, The Caring Business.) Thinking along these lines prompts other, more contemporary, reminiscences.

I am at the annual conference of a voluntary sector organisation. The chief executive, fresh back from an intensive management course at a leading American university business school, includes in his opening remarks the comment: ‘We are a business. We want to be at the cutting edge. We want to be in the top 10 per cent soon and we want to be the industry leader in the not too distant future.’ A succession of senior and middle managers from the organisation address the conference, stating how the parts of the organisation for which they are responsible can contribute to the mission the chief executive has proclaimed.

In the period leading to the death of my father, I am on the telephone to a social worker in my father’s local Social Services Department. The conversation is a little stilted. Regardless of anything I say, the social worker pulls me back to a series of short, tersely delivered, questions about various aspects of my father’s physical functioning. Some time later, I am on the telephone to a different social worker. The experience is exactly the same. In fact, I realise that he is asking me the same short questions in the same order as the social worker I spoke to the last time. This experience is repeated a third time, a few days later. These three social workers have responded to each of my calls by taking me through a scripted assessment over the telephone. I have had scripted exchanges which were more engaging and responsive at the windows of drive-through fast-food restaurants.

I go to visit a student on placement. After checking in with the receptionist, and having been issued with a security pass, I ask where the toilet is. The receptionist looks slightly flustered and says she is not sure whether I should use the customers’ toilet or the staff toilet. I say the customers’ toilet will be fine and am directed to a door with a large TOILET FOR CUSTOMERS OF SOCIAL SERVICES sign. I meet up with the practice teacher, who I have known for some years, and the student. I remark on the smart new telephone-answering machine sitting on the practice teacher’s desk. She looks slightly embarrassed and explains that one of the ‘quality standards’ in this Social Services Department is that 90 per cent of calls must be answered within three rings. She, and several of her colleagues, have been taken to task for failing to meet this standard, so many of them have purchased their own answering machines and now the standard is being met.

I am working as a social worker, on secondment from my university job. I attend my induction training. I am sitting next to a new home help. We get chatting, while we are waiting for the session to start. She says that she used to work for a private home care agency. I ask why she wanted to move to the Social Services Department. She tells me that in her previous job, she had an evening call which involved putting someone to bed. She drove three miles in each direction to do this, was allowed fifteen minutes, including travelling time, to do it and was paid no travelling expenses. At that time (just before the introduction of the minimum wage) she was being paid £2 an hour. So, for being away from her home for an hour or more in the evening, she was being paid 50p, and then having to pay for her petrol. She says, ‘Do I need to say any more?’

What jolted me in each of these everyday experiences, and many more which I have not recounted, was the intrusion of ‘business thinking’. Different people in different settings and circumstances were ‘doing the business’. On each occasion, the business ethos was simply there, as a seemingly inescapable reality through which social work had to be conducted and, as a consequence, social work appeared to have lost any of the critical edge it once possessed. This book seeks to document how that position was reached in social work and to identify some of the key dimensions of the social work business.

Constructing social work

The book begins from the premiss that the forces constructing social work lie outside of social work itself: social work is shaped by the societal context from which it emerges. Although it is clear that international markets and the global economy now exert pressures on the direction social welfare policy takes in particular societies (Deacon et al. 1997; George 1998; Barns et al. 1999), the societal context has been shown to shape different versions of social work (Harris and McDonald 2000; Harris and Yueh-Ching Chou 2001). Therefore, in this book the mediating impact of the British context is seen as central to understanding the development of the social work business. The emphasis on context is also seen as a necessary counterbalance to accounts of social work in which it is portrayed as simply an activity in which individual social workers are engaged or as a professional project with its own, internally-driven, trajectory (McDonald et al. forthcoming). Accordingly, in the remainder of the book, rather than thinking about social work as a phenomenon which somehow develops itself, it is positioned in relation to changes in its context; changes that led to the construction and reconstruction of social work in Britain and, in the process, to the establishment and consolidation of the social work business.

Those changes have taken place within the overarching framework of liberal representative democracy (Pierson 1998). Within this framework, the welfare state has provided the primary vehicle for the mediation of social work. The institutional and organisational processes of the welfare state have been the source of social work’s legal and moral authority and have constituted the material conditions for its practice. Ultimately, social workers implement legislation on behalf of the state, as an arm of social policy, rather than as an autonomous profession. The law sets out the rights, duties and responsibilities of social workers, on the one hand, and of service users, on the other, in those socially problematic areas which have been accorded official recognition. The law not only defines the ends of social work, but constitutes the source of social workers’ authority for the means by which they intervene in service users’ lives in the pursuit of statutory duties. In other words, social work is not just mediated by its context in a general sense: more specifically and directly it is a mediated profession, with the state deciding who its clientele will be and what should be provided for them (Johnson 1972:77).

In the policy, practice and analysis of the British post-war welfare state, a clear distinction was drawn between public non-commercial activities, which the welfare state was considered to exemplify, and private commercial activities, driven by the market’s profit motive. The welfare state was seen as shouldering responsibilities that were intrinsically non-capitalist. Its interventions, such as social work, were depicted as being driven by a very different dynamic and as protected from the vagaries of market forces. This was the case in both social democratic accounts of the welfare state (see Ch. 2) and neo-Marxist discussions of ‘non-capitalist state activities’ (Carchedi 1977). As late as 1993, a book on public sector management could begin:

In this book, we are mostly concerned with those services which are mainly or completely funded by taxation and which are not sold to customers at prices which produce profits. This is a very distinctive part of the economy because the ‘normal’ processes of producing goods and services do not apply. As well as public services not being run generally to make a profit, there is no competition in the sense of firms trying to entice customers away from competitors. Because these basic features of a market are absent, many of the principles of management which apply to the private sector are absent. Other principles, such as equitable treatment and allocation of resources according to need, pervade the processes of decision-making and management.

(Flynn 1993:xi–xii)

Social work occupied a niche in this ‘non-capitalist’ sphere and accounting for the development of the social work business is inseparable from analysing the destabilisation of that niche and its subsequent transformation. The transformation has been largely taken-for-granted as a series of incremental adaptations to the changed context of the surrounding welfare regime (Pollitt 1990; Clarke et al. 1994; Evers et al. 1997; Flösser and Otto 1998). However, the cumulative effect of the transformation, the social work business, makes it difficult to sustain the clear analytical distinction, previously made by social democratic and neo-Marxist commentators, between public services and private sector businesses. Rather, ‘social domains, whose concern is not producing commodities in the narrower economic sense of goods for sale, come nevertheless to be organised and conceptualised in terms of commodity production, distribution and consumption’ (Fairclough 1992:207). Another way of putting this is that the culture of capitalism has colonised the public sector as business thinking and practices have crossed the public-private sector divide and been transplanted into activities such as social work. As a result, social work has shifted to operating in accordance with a ‘quasi-business discourse’ within which the explicit or implicit assumption is that social work should, as far as possible, function as if it were a commercial business concerned with making profits.

Doing the business

The quasi-business discourse in social work does not galvanise the straightforward implementation of a neutral set of knowledge, skills and techniques, despite the frequent depiction of it as such. The discourse is the outcome of political choice or, more accurately, as will be shown later in the book, a series of political choices. Those choices have identified business thinking and practice as representing a distinctive and valuable expertise and have used that expertise as a resource in a struggle for power. In other words, expertise from business has been used to rearrange and consolidate sets of power relations in social work, as the later chapters show. However, the politics and power of the social work business are not necessarily immediately apparent. The quasi-business discourse may be a very limited way of thinking—a ‘bounded rationality’—but it does not appear to be so: ‘All bounded rationalities tend to conceal their own boundedness and appear to those who operate within them to be universal’ (Muetzelfeldt 1994:151). In other words, for much of the time the quasi-business discourse in social work governs the limits and form of what is knowable, sayable and do-able (Bourdieu 1991; Foucault 1991; Harris, P. 1999). As such, the discourse contributes to the construction of the social identities of social workers, managers and service users and shapes the networks of social relations in which they engage (Fairclough 1992:64); it inculcates a ‘habitus’—a set of dispositions that incline people to act and react in certain ways (Bourdieu 1991:51). Reflecting on her experience of higher education in New Zealand, O’Connor refers to managerialism (a key component of the discourse) as having been

gradually grafted on to us and now it is the way we plan, it is the way we do things, it is the way we speak. It is like sexism or racism before we realised…. It is a tribute to the power of the ‘there is no alternative’ mantra uttered in different ways a million times until everyone just believed it and did it…. Managerialism became the wallpaper of our lives.

(O’Connor 2000:4–5)

This statement captures graphically the centrality of the quasi-business discourse to the maintenance of relations of power within social work. In articulating and closing off definitions of the ‘reality’ of the social work business, the discourse patterns the day-to-day reality of what ‘social work’ now means, of what is thinkable in social work, and the terms and conditions under which social work is organised and practised. In addition, the opacity of the quasi-business discourse in social work is supported by lived experience in the wider society in which the ‘business way of doing things’ features increasingly strongly.

The book

In the next chapter, the characteristics of social work within the British welfare state in the pre-business era are explored. The chapter outlines the shoring up of social work’s position following the implementation of the Seebohm Report (Cmnd. 3703 1968). The levels in social work’s bureaucratic hierarchy are then set out as a precursor to highlighting the existence of a parochial professional culture in social work, within which social workers enjoyed a substantial degree of autonomy and discretion as ‘bureau-professionals’.

Chapter 3 begins its account of the establishment of the social work business by exploring general aspects of the pressure on nation states to become more business-like and highlights the significance of the political strategies used by individual nation states to position their social welfare regimes in relation to the global economy. In this regard, the political strategy adopted by the first Thatcher government, elected in 1979, is discussed in terms of its exploitation of a perceived crisis in order to achieve major change in the British welfare state. The argument is then advanced that, against the backcloth of this wider context, the social services sphere of community care was used as the primary vehicle for the establishment of the social work business through two inter-related developments: marketisation and managerialism.

The way the social work business was run thereafter was premissed on a generic model of management, which minimised the differences between the management of capitalist enterprises and the management of public services in a new mode of ‘marketised state’ provision. Chapter 4 examines the diffusion of quasi-capitalist rationality, as part of a quasi-business discourse, and the consequent similarities that developed between running private sector businesses and the social work business. Managerial incursions into social work, constrained by cash limits and the intensification of competitive forces through quasi-markets, are shown to have resulted in a range of measures for controlling the activities of social workers.

By the time New Labour came to power in 1997, the context within which social work operated and the content of social work itself had changed fundamentally as a result of the establishment of the social work business. New Labour accepted the business legacy it inherited from the Conservatives and set about its modernisation. Chapter 5 identifies the origins of the modernisation programme in ‘Third Way’ thinking and argues that there are substantial areas of overlap between the New Right and New Labour. The modern business model, represented by ‘Best Value’, is outlined as a precursor to charting the modernisation of the social work business. The central significance of regulation and audit is discussed as part of the framework for reconstructing social work practice and controlling professional discretion.

In parallel with the establishment and modernisation of the social work business, a process of reform in social work education has taken place, and that reform is the subject of Chapter 6. Consolidation of external authority over social work education has reinforced, and served as another avenue for, the extension of the quasi-business discourse.

Businesses have customers, and Chapter 7 provides an account of the attempts made to create customers for the social work business, by re-imaging, or perhaps more accurately re-imagining, the people on the receiving end of social work. After considering the significance attached to the customer identity, the shift to a customer focus in the social work business is located in the Conservative reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the consolidation of those reforms by New Labour. The customer base of the social work business is then scrutinised in order to discuss whether the creation of customers is a feasible and/or desirable goal.

Businesses also have supply chains. Chapter 8 reviews developments in the social work business’ supply chain in so far as the voluntary sector and informal carers are concerned. Voluntary organisations have been enveloped in a new term, the ‘independent sector’, and have had to compete for funding against other voluntary organisations and against the commercial sector. Contractual trading relationships have subjected the sector to quasi-capitalist rationality and have eroded aspects of its distinctiveness in relation to the commercial sector. In tandem, the Conservative governments’ reforms positioned caring as the core resource in packages of care. Caring arrangements in households became actively identified, publicly negotiated, carefully organised and subject to formal agreements about the scope and nature of the care provided, often with the goal of averting service provision. New Labour articulated and consolidated this shift to caring as an expression of citizenship obligation, refining its ideological basis and securing its position in the social work business supply chain.

The book concludes with an attempt to peer below the surface of the social work business, considering its personal impact on social workers, its past record and its future prospects.

2 Before the business era

Within liberal representative democratic governance...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• The social work business
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms
• 1: Doing the business
• 2: Before the business era
• 3: Establishing the business
• 4: Running the business
• 5: Modernising the business
• 6: Learning the business
• 7: Creating the customer base
• 8: Sorting out the supply chain
• 9: Seeing through the social work business
• Bibliography