Human Services Management

Organizational Leadership in Social Work Practice

David Austin

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9780231528429
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Human services management occurs in nonprofit, governmental, and for-profit sectors and involves a wide variety of organizational structures. These diverse conditions shape the effort to produce and project services that directly affect the quality of life of individuals, families, and communities through social welfare, health and mental health, criminal justice, and educational services. David Austin begins with an examination of the historical development and distinctive characteristics of human service organizations, the variety of organizational and program structures at play, and the connection of individual service organizations with service delivery networks. He then examines of the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholder constituencies, including service users, service personnel (especially service professionals), funders, executives, and policy boards. The final two chapters discuss two organizational processes: accountability for effectiveness and dealing with organizational changes.

ONE

INTRODUCTION

But let us look further at the essentials of leadership. Of the greatest importance is the ability to grasp a total situation. The chief mistake in thinking of leadership as resting wholly on personality lies probably in the fact that the executive leader is not a leader of men only but of something we are learning to call the total situation. This includes facts, present and potential, aims and purposes and men. Out of a welter of facts, experience, desires, aims, a leader must find the unifying thread. He must see a whole, not a kaleidoscope of pieces. He must see the relation between all the different factors in a situation. The higher up you go, the more ability you have to have of this kind, because you have a wider range of facts from which to seize the relations.

—Mary Parker Follett (Graham 1995:168)

WE LIVE in a world of organizations in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Society is governed through a complex network of international, national, state, and local political/governmental organizations. Goods and services that are part of everyday living are obtained through organizational systems that reach around the world. Growing up, to a large degree, is growing up in a world of educational organizations. For most individuals, working in or with an organization is a central feature of their adult years, organizations that may be very large and impersonal or that may be small and intimate. Organizational arrangements of many types shape retirement years. In the world of organizations, the shift from an industrial society to the postindustrial society is a shift from goods-producing organizations to service-producing organizations (Bell 1973) and, increasingly, information-producing organizations.

Persons who work in, or through, human service organizations—social workers, nurses, physicians, lawyers, teachers, psychologists, counselors, clergy—spend much of their time with organizations, either the organization that they work in, or the organizations they deal with as part of their workday. In the United States, this world of human service organizations is undergoing a series of far-reaching changes (Bozeman 1987). Traditional distinctions among marketplace, for-profit firms, governmental bureaus, and nonprofit voluntary organizations are breaking down. The division of organizational responsibilities among different levels of government is changing dramatically. Traditional bureaucratic, hierarchical, “command-and-control” models of organizational management are mixed with low-profile, diffuse, and dispersed authority models (Drucker 1996, 1998).

Traditional career assumptions about long-term, stable employment in a single organization, whether marketplace, governmental, or nonprofit, are being replaced by assumptions of multiple career changes, career transformations, and continuous reeducation (Kanter 1996:142–144):

The organization of the future requires a focus on new human resource policies. Organizations must help people gain the skills and self-reliance to master the new environment, to find security and support when they can no longer count on large employers to provide it automatically…. If security no longer comes from being employed, it must come from being employable…. Employability security comes from the chance to accumulate the human capital of skills and reputation that can be invested in new opportunities as they arise.

These changes affect everybody who is, or potentially may be, a user of the services that are produced through human service organizations. They also affect everyone who is directly involved in such organizations as an employee, a funder, a service volunteer, or a policy maker, and, in particular, organizational managers (Edwards, Cooke, and Reid 1996:468).

In the near future, the changing political realities and their social and cultural context will bring additional challenges to the social work profession and to those who manage social work and human services organizations…. Social work managers must function in an atmosphere of increasing ambiguity and paradox. Managers are confronted almost daily with the need to satisfy different and sometimes competing values and stakeholder interests, all in a context of diminishing resources and organizational security within the service system.

New emphases on development of a comprehensive “continuum of service,” competition among organizational service providers, quality management, and the definition and measurement of the outcomes of service provision are changing the responsibilities of organizational managers (Chism 1997). Changes in technology—teaching technology, health-care technology, information technology—make new demands on individuals in leadership roles. New rules about organizational accountability, and the role of the courts in enforcing accountability, create pressures on organizational managers and professional specialists. In particular, the complex tasks of organizational management require constant attention to events outside of the service organization that may directly affect activities within the organization. The cultural transformation of the society of the United States as a result of demographic, legal, and political changes has become a central element in the functioning of all types of human service organizations.

In this world of changing organizations, an understanding of the nature of service organizations (Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons 1994) and of the forces that shape such organizations is as important for front-line, direct-service, human service professional practitioners as for organizational managers and policy makers. Such an understanding is essential if professional practitioners, including social workers, nurses, school teachers, doctors, psychologists, lawyers, and other human service practitioners, are to provide responsive and high-quality services to individuals, families, and communities. An awareness of the changes that are taking place is also important, personally, for professional practitioners trying to understand the forces that will affect their ability to provide quality services and the pattern of their own professional careers.

The perspective of this book is that human services management is a complex version of the general field of organizational management in service organizations (Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons 1994). Human services management takes place within the nonprofit sector and the public, or governmental, sector and, increasingly, within the for-profit sector. It involves a wide variety of organizational structures through which very diverse technologies are used to produce services that directly affect the quality of life of individuals and families across the fields of social welfare services, health and mental health services, law enforcement and criminal justice, and educational services. Managers in human service organizations simultaneously carry responsibility for the quality of the services provided for individuals and families, for assuring that such services also result in benefits for communities and the society as a whole, and for making provision for the maintenance and development of the service organization. The requirements of ethical behavior in management become a central issue for managers and for other organizational participants (Reamer 1995).

The purpose of this book is to assist participants in human service organizations in developing an understanding of the dynamics that are shaping such organizations. The background of this author is primarily connected with social welfare services and with social work education. Many illustrations used in this book are drawn from social welfare organizations. The broad range of human services, however, is the context for this book, with the expectation that the content may be as relevant for the hospital administrator or the school superintendent as for the manager of a nonprofit, voluntary family service agency, a public child-welfare agency, or a community mental health center.

The development of this book has been influenced by the ideas of Mary Parker Follett, an unusual speaker and writer who was an important member of the social work community early in the twentieth century. Follett brought insights from her experience as a settlement house worker in the Roxbury community of Boston to her career in the 1920s and 1930s as a consultant on management–labor relations and as a lecturer in business management at conferences in the United States and England (Graham 1995). Follett defined the business organization as a social system, a social system that had community consequences as well as production outcomes (Graham 1995; Selber and Austin 1997). Follett’s ideas are drawn on throughout this book as the human service organization is examined as a social system that has special connections to the society of which it is a part. This book also draws on the work of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a contemporary teacher and writer on business management whose thinking, in turn, draws on the work of Mary Parker Follett (Kanter 1995).

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The Rationalization of Society

During the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States, a complex urban–industrial society developed that was different from societies that had existed for centuries in other parts of the world. Millions of new settlers arrived, primarily from Europe. Millions of people moved across the territory of the United States. Concentrations of new industries were established in the cities that attracted most of the new arrivals. These developments required the creation of new social organizations, transforming an earlier society organized primarily around networks of personal relationships into a society of “rational” organizations through which large numbers of strangers became parts of an operating society that had consistency and predictability.

Many of these developments were set in motion by the Civil War during the 1860s, which brought about large-scale development of business and industrial resources in the northern states as well as the organization of hundreds of thousands of men into a systematic military structure. Wartime developments in both business and government created the framework required for mobilizing resources for the expansion of urban settlements across the continent. The outcome of the Civil War also resulted in the exclusion of the citizens of the southern states from many of the economic and social developments that characterized the rest of the nation during the last half of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century.

There were two major societal tasks in the last part of the nineteenth century. One was the production of goods and services for a rapidly expanding population, a large portion of which lived in cities where households could not be self-sufficient. The other was building communities from a population of strangers—that is, building socially functioning local communities on the frontier where there was no established society (Smith 1966), and in the cities where thousands of people from many different cultural backgrounds were thrown together.

Several distinct organizational models emerged during this period that contributed in different ways both to the production of goods and services and to the building of communities. One was the stock corporation, through which thousands of investors combined their resources to create large industrial firms and to build railroads linking all corners of the nation. The stock corporation made it possible to separate the sources of capital investment from the responsibilities of organizational management. This created new opportunities for aggressive entrepreneurial business leaders who did not have inherited family wealth, and it also created a rapidly expanding class of salaried business managers.

A second model was the organization of industrial firms as unified production systems using unskilled and semiskilled workmen under the guidance of industrial engineers, displacing the tradition of individual skilled craftsmen prepared through long apprenticeships (Shenhav 1995). These factory workers could be readily laid off, and then replaced, during the economic boom-and-bust cycles associated with the expanding but unregulated market economy following the Civil War (Lens 1969).

A third model was the governmental bureau (as distinct from the legislative, or governance, elements of government). The organization of the governmental bureau reflected, in part, the experience of the military forces with a structured command hierarchy, a separation of policy formulation from day-to-day production activities, and a system of rules and regulations intended to produce consistency and predictability. This was a model that provided relatively stable and dependable employment but did not allow for an aggressive entrepreneurial manager.

A fourth model was the philanthropic corporation, which combined the model of the business firm with its board of directors, but without owners or stockholders, or stock dividends, with an older model of the charitable foundation or trust. The role of the philanthropic corporation as a “nonprofit” corporation became prominent after the adoption of the federal income tax in the early 1920s, with the exemption of nonprofit organizations from tax obligations together with provisions for income tax deductions for “charitable” contributions to such nonprofit organizations.*

A fifth model was the public university as a setting for large-scale, practical education of the occupational specialists needed in the new society, and for the application of scientific discoveries to the development of new products and technologies. The public university was distinctly different from the private liberal arts college that served as a setting for the education of elite social and political leaders. One important difference was the coeducational student body in public universities, in contrast to the almost universal division of private colleges into men’s and women’s colleges.

A sixth model was the organized profession that brought together large numbers of occupational specialists, for example in law and medicine, to form national, mutual-benefit associations in order to develop ethical standards of practice and to advance their economic interests (Starr 1982). Professional associations also served to define, as well as to control, the process of entrance into such “professions” through accreditation control of professional schools attached to colleges and universities and the establishment of systems of governmentally sponsored professional licensing procedures (MacDonald 1995).

All of these organizational models were part of the process of “rationalizing,” “standardizing,” and “civilizing” a society that was expanding rapidly and incorporating large numbers of new arrivals from very diverse cultural backgrounds. The linkage of these “rational” organizations into a series of national networks was one important element in preventing the fragmentation of the society of the United States into a series of small, competitive nation-states reflecting the historical traditions of Europe. The Civil War of the 1860s had indicated that such a fragmentation was indeed a possibility. In addition to these large-scale organizational structures, the post–Civil War era was marked by the development of a dense network of local voluntary organizations and associations reflecting the cultural diversity and diversity of interests among the residents of local communities. These “mediating” organizations mediated the relationships between individual households and the larger structures of government, business, and national associations, creating a “civil society” that also provided a wide range of leadership opportunities for individual citizens (Drucker 1990b). The development of the civil society was also influenced by the tradition of locally initiated voluntary associations that were a key element in the conversion of frontier settlements into functioning “communities” (Smith 1966).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF “SOCIETAL” SERVICES

One of the significant areas to be affected by this process of rationalization was the broad range of organizationally based social, or “societal,” services provided through the diverse combination of nonprofit, voluntary organizations and governmental service organizations that functione...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Human Service Organizations
• 3. Stakeholder Constituencies
• 4. Organizational Structure and Program Design
• 5. Service Delivery Networks
• 6. The User/Consumer Constituency
• 7. Organized Professions and Human Service Organizations
• 8. Legitimators and Funders
• 9. The Human Service Executive
• 10. Boards of Directors and Advisory Committees
• 11. Accountability
• 12. Dealing with Change
• References
• Index