Carole Smith

Neo-bureaucracy and public management: the case of medicine in the national health service

Contemporary public service management in the UK is accompanied by discourses of the ‘third way’ and ‘new public management’ that claim to stand in contrast to older bureaucratic approaches based on hierarchy and rule-adherence. Our examination of approaches to the management of National Health Service medicine over the last twenty years suggests the reverse: that in this particular sector at least, there has been increasing bureaucratisation, though based on rules enforced by regulatory agencies rather than by hierarchical management. Drawing on a number of long-established literatures, we argue that this ‘neobureaucracy’ is likely to possess inadequate technical, political and behavioural capacities for what is expected of it.

The Sovereign State v Foucault: Law and Disciplinary Power

A Foucauldian analysis of discourse and power relations suggests that law and the juridical field have lost their pre-eminent role in government via the delegated exercise of sovereign power. According to Foucault, the government of a population is achieved through the wide dispersal of technologies of power which are relatively invisible and which function in discursive sites and practices throughout the social fabric. Expert knowledge occupies a privileged position in government and its essentially discretionary and norm-governed judgements infiltrate and colonise previous sites of power. This paper sets out to challenge a Foucauldian view that principled law has ceded its power and authority to the disciplinary sciences and their expert practitioners. It argues, with particular reference to case law on sterilisation and caesarean sections, that law and the juridical field operate to manipulate and control expert knowledge to their own ends. In so doing, law continually exercises and re-affirms its power as part of the sovereign state. Far from acting, as Foucault suggests, to provide a legitimating gloss on the subversive operations of technologies of power, law turns the tables and itself operates a form of surveillance over the norm-governed exercise of expert knowledge.

Values and rights: Content and form in social work education and practice

Social Work values have been the subject of extensive discussion relating to interpretation and their application in practice. A new discourse of rights now demands attention. It is argued that social work educators have not caught up with the central importance of rights. They have, as a consequence, failed to examine the difference between values and rights, and the importance of maintaining a balance between beliefs and compliance. This article argues that an analysis of the relationship between values and rights, and an awareness of the ways in which they crucially influence practice are vital to shaping the activity of social work in a world where, some have suggested, social work has become post-modern.

Secure accommodation under the Children Act 1989: Legislative confusion and social ambivalence

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between the general principles set out in section 1 of the Children Act 1989 and what may be identified as the ‘relevant criteria’ about which a court must be satisfied before it makes an order to place, or more usually to keep, a young person in secure accommodation under section 25 of the Act. This area has seen contradictory decisions in appeals from the Family Proceedings Courts and confusion about the role of the Guardian ad Litem in secure accommodation proceedings. An attempt to clarify the position proceeds by reference to an historical analysis, Department of Health Guidance, case-law and Parliamentary debate. It is argued that the ambiguity inherent in legislation relating to secure accommodation, and the role of the Guardian ad Litem, reflects societys ambivalence with regard to the care and control of young people with difficult and challenging behaviour