The Future of Human Service Organizational & Management Research

Navigating Complex Frontiers

Bowen McBeath, Karen Hopkins, Bowen McBeath, Karen Hopkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367484811
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000069655
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides panoramic overviews of critical human service organizational and management practice challenges, as well as new and needed research frontiers.

The Future of Human Service Organizational & Management Research: Navigating Complex Frontiers invites researchers, educators, and practitioners to explore: the intersection of the complex environment of public and private human service organizations; and the rise and uncertain effects of new developments in social work, public policy and public management, and other helping professions. The contributors identify how future generations of macro practitioners and scholar-researchers can:

• Improve service delivery and program effectiveness;
• Implement evidence-based practices and evidence-informed practices;
• Promote leadership and social innovation;
• Build linkages across micro, meso, and macro levels of practice;
• Train organizational leaders and educate practitioners; and
• Advocate for more socially just visions of social welfare and society.

This edited collection argues that human service organizational and management practice and research are needed to support new discoveries in social welfare, social work, and related professions.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance.

Pathways for Promoting Macro Practice in Social Work Education: A Commentary

Michael J. Austin

ABSTRACT

As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is time to move beyond the wake-up call provided by the 2013 Rothman Report on the future of macro practice and its perceived decline. While most of the report’s recommendations focused on the external environment related to recognition by national social work organizations and future enrollment targets (20% macro for entering MSW students), it is now timely to look internally to address our own issues. Faculty need to step back to assess their own capacities to integrate macro practice curriculum content, given the contracting “shelf space” of course offerings. This commentary explores three pathways to macro practice: 1) integrating community, management, and policy practice curricula, 2) re-positioning macro practice in the advanced practice curricula, and 3) revisiting the relationship between micro and macro practice related to the CSWE practice competencies. The commentary concludes with a future research agenda.

Overview

Macro practice has a rich and storied history in social work practice and education over the past 100 years (Austin, 2018; Gutierrez & Gant, 2018; Jansson, 2014). In this commentary, macro practice refers to the educational programs and career paths that include community practice, management practice, and policy practice. The parallel evolution of these three domains of macro practice over the past century informs their respective development as well as their impact on direct practice, the largest arena of social work practice. Their inter-relationships are explored in this commentary through the use of three pathways for promoting macro practice. The first pathway features integrating elements of macro practice and the second pathway locates macro practice within the curriculum space of advanced social work practice. And the third pathway is based on the assumption that elements of macro practice are built into the curriculum of the foundation of social work practice where it is possible to build bridges between micro and macro practice. The commentary also draws upon the macro practice knowledge base that is found, in part, in the three major macro practice journals of the profession (Human Service Organizations, founded in 1977; Journal of Community Practice, founded in 1992; Journal of Policy Practice, founded in 2001).

Urgency of this commentary

For many years, the marketplace for attracting social workers to the arena of macro practice has been the human services sector. Applicants to macro practice social work programs were often staff members of nonprofit human service organizations where they learned about social work when working in schools, hospitals, youth organizations, senior centers, Peace Corp and Americorp volunteers, and others. While they may have begun their careers in the human service providing direct services to clients, many became intrigued with organizational roles related to inter-agency planning, program management, and policy advocacy. These experiences led them to discover that there were social work graduate programs that included specializations in one or more domains of macro practice.

At the same time, competition in the marketplace has increased dramatically with the proliferation of undergraduate and graduate programs in nonprofit management, public administration, and public policy. While many of the prospective applicants may have interest in leading and managing human service organizations, they are usually unaware of this career option when it is buried in the curriculum of a school of social work. In a parallel development, there are those disenchanted with the corporate life as well as undergraduate social science majors looking to make a difference in the lives of others.

While the enrollments in the area of macro social work practice have grown in a few large (often public) universities, they have declined or disappeared in other universities where the demand (from students and agencies) to educate direct service practitioners continues to expand. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was a growing concern about the reductions in macro practice offerings in schools of social work that led to a “wake-up call” in the form of the 2013 Rothman Report commissioned by ACOSA as highlighted in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Education for macro practice (2013 Rothman report)*.*Rothman (2013). Education for macro intervention: A survey of problems and prospects. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles (htt­ps:­//w­ww.­aco­sa.­org­/jo­oml­a/p­df/­Rot­hma­nRe­por­tRe­vis­edJ­une­201­3.p­df).

The report was built upon a literature review and faculty survey. The literature review captured the following highlights: 1) macro practice has become “a marginalized subfield in social work” (Fisher and Corciullo, 2011, p. 359), 2) as of 2011, MSW student enrollment in macro areas reached 8.8% (management or administration, 2.4%; community planning/organization, 2.1%; combined community planning and management administration, 2.7%; social policy, 1%; combined social policy and program evaluation, 0.6%), 3) according to the NASW Center for Workforce Studies, 14% of social workers identify macro as their practice focus (Whitaker & Arrington, 2008), 4) there is a considerable shortage of social work practitioners with the full range of knowledge, skills, and experience needed to tackle immense challenges facing low-income neighborhoods (Mott, 2008), and 5) in addition to the somewhat random nature of on-the-job training, the primary vehicles for developing entry-level macro practice social work competencies for the profession are located in schools of social work.

The ACOSA Report led to the publication of the Macro Practice Guide (CSWE, 2018) for social work educators by the Council on Social Work Education. At the same time, the Network for Social Work Managers (2018) revised its guide to Human Services Management Competencies. By 2019, the workforce study of the Council on Social Work Education (2019) reported that recent graduates had selected the following areas of specialization: direct practice (81.5%) and macro practice that included community organizing, policy advocacy, and indirect management practice (17.2%). It seems that the national goal of 20% macro practice may be within reach.

The underlying theme of this commentary includes the need to balance a sense of urgency with a sense of calm about addressing the future of social work macro practice on campus and in the community. Even though a few schools of social work possess a strong investment in macro practice in terms of student and faculty resources, macro practice in general is competing for limited social work curriculum space and faculty support. In essence, the lessons from the past suggest a need for more urgency than calm when it comes to the future of social work macro practice. The past is briefly captured in the detour that follows.

Reflecting upon teaching macro practice

As a newly-minted assistant professor nearly 50 years ago (1970) with an MSW in community organizing and administration and a PhD in organizational research, I was confronted with my first teaching challenge; namely, specifying course content and identifying relevant literature. I was hired to start-up the macro practice component of a predominantly direct service or casework school. With little guidance from available course outlines and the limited literature (Kahn, 1969; Rothman & Jones, 1971; Schatz, 1970), I found myself deeply influenced by my MSW experience with my mentor, Ralph Kramer and his social work background in community organizing and social planning (Kramer & Specht, 1969). While most of the literature reflected the nonprofit sector, my practice experience related primarily to federal government programs (War on Poverty and Community Mental Health) which proved to be very helpful since I landed in a school located in a state capitol with very few student fieldwork placement opportunities except in state government human service agencies.

During my first few years of teaching, the community practice literature grew exponentially (Note 1). By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the management practice literature also grew significantly (Note 2). By the 1980s, a new journal had emerged (Administration in Social Work, 1977 and later changed to Human Service Organizations in 2012) and macro faculty were searching for peer support and information exchange at annual CSWE meetings when they formed a section of the Council on Social Work Education in 1987 known as ACOSA (Association for Community Organizing and Social Administration).

These developments also led to the founding of the Journal on Community Practice in 1992 and the Journal of Policy Practice in 2001. While the teaching of macro practice continued to followed the separate tracks institutionalized by the three different journals, there were beginning efforts to lay the macro practice groundwork for integrating the three areas of community, management and policy practice (Austin, 1986). Many of these efforts took the form of “advanced social work practice” that sought to integrate micro and macro practice in order to supplement the education of students focused on direct practice. Some of the leadership in this area of curriculum development came from faculty teaching in undergraduate BSW programs who were interested in providing a more comprehensive approach to social work practice. This theme is explored later in this commentary.

Pathway #1: integrating elements of macro practice

By “fast forwarding” from a brief history to the twenty-first century, new challenges emerged in the search for the theoretical foundations for macro practice. Given the long history of providing course content in the area of human behavior in the social environment (HBSE), it became increasingly clear that more attention was being devoted to understanding human behavior within a micro practice context and less attention to the social environment within a macro practice context. The major exception to this perspective was the long-standing commitment in social work education to the teaching of social policy so that practitioners across the micro-mezzo-macro practice spectrum could engage in policy-informed practice.

Trifocal theory perspective for macro practice

Given that the social environment is a critical domain for macro practice, new efforts emerged to define this arena (Taylor, Austin, & Mulroy, 2004a, 2004b). Similar to the long European tradition of theory-informed practice, there was a need to move from theory familiarity that is most common in the social sciences (resource dependency theory, political economy theory, critical race theory, etc.) to a set of key concepts derived from community, organizational, and group theory (Mulroy & Austin, 2004). This body of theory is drawn from a considerable knowledge base constructed by Hasenfeld (1983), Fellin (2001), and Levi (2018) and provides a foundation for theory-informed macro practice as noted in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Balancing macro practice on a foundation of theories about human behavior and the social environment.

A set of concepts derived from the contributions of social work and related scholars were selected to provide macro practitioners with the tools to engage in assessing the dynamics of communities, groups, and organizations through the use of a trifocal perspective. The key concepts included in the assessment “tool box” include the structure and process of a group, community, or organization where the trifocal perspective also includes other concepts to assess: stages of development, power and leadership, systems of exchange, conflict and change, integrating mechanisms, diversity, and practitioner–environment interactions as noted in Figure 3 (Mulroy & Austin, 2004).

Figure 3. Core concepts as tools for assessing the dynamics of communities, groups, and organizations*.

*Mulroy and Austin (2004). Toward a comprehensive framework for understanding the soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Gratitude and Dedication
• Introduction: Navigating Complex Frontiers: Introduction to the Special Issue on “The Future of Human Service Organizational and Management Research”
• 1 Pathways for Promoting Macro Practice in Social Work Education: A Commentary
• 2 Implementation Science and Human Service Organizations Research: Opportunities and Challenges for Building on Complementary Strengths
• 3 We Could Be Unicorns: Human Services Leaders Moving from Managing Programs to Managing Information Ecosystems
• 4 Modest Challenges for the Fields of Human Service Administration and Social Policy Research and Practice
• 5 Evaluating Behavioral and Organizational Outcomes of Leadership Development in Human Service Organizations
• 6 Human Service Organization-Environment Relationships in Relation to Environmental Justice: Old and New Approaches to Macro Practice and Research
• 7 Social Good Science and Practice: A New Framework for Organizational and Managerial Research in Human Service Organizations
• 8 How the “What Works” Movement is Failing Human Service Organizations, and What Social Work Can Do to Fix It
• 9 De-Implementation of Evidence-Based Interventions: Implications for Organizational and Managerial Research
• 10 What Can “Big Data” Methods Offer Human Services Research on Organizations and Communities?
• 11 Crafting the Future of Macro Practice
• Index