Elizabeth Harlow - Management, Social Work and Change

Management is one of those words that often seems to evoke very contrasting reactions. For some, it is a dirty word; for others it is a panacea for all ills. In some cases these contrasting responses are held ambivalently by the same person or group of people. We may love and we may hate it. And when the talk turns from management to managerialism, the responses tend to become yet more intense still. These contradictions apply all the more so to the meanings of management in and around social work. This is partly because at first sight management, or certain forms of management, appear to stand in tension with, and perhaps in opposition to, social works traditional ethics concerning care and assistance. It can be argued that as managerialism has increased so have these tensions and ambivalences. In some senses then, we are living in different times, as argued in the Introduction to this book. Despite some postmodernist offerings to the contrary, such a postmodernist thesis and framework is itself an embedded historical reading.

Yet management may not be such a stranger to social work after all. In this sense some of the ambivalences around it, at least in the social work context, may not quite be what they seem. For a start, management has been there as part of social work from its modern beginnings. The Charity Organisation Society was clear about organisation and management. It was not just faith, hope and charity but the organisation and management of charity on rational lines. Indeed, social work requires some form of organisation. Social work is not just giving or helping; it is assistance located within the context of an agency or set of agencies. Without an agency, social work becomes something else like being nice to your neighbour. In addition, agencies are not, at least very rarely, free-floating collectives in permanent revolution, but are themselves managed. The delivery of social work, whether directly or indirectly, needs managing, if only in the sense of gathering resources for the agency to continue to survive. That can be done by one person (the manager), several people (management), or everyone (managerial processes or self-management). Social work not only involves the ethic of care but also the imperative of control. For example, some residential, group care and family work is concerned with the control as well as the care of clients. Management, in this context, can be seen as the higher order organisational control of day-to-day controls.