Tony Evans

‘Street-level bureaucracy, management and the corrupted world of service’

Lipskys analysis of the implementation gap in welfare policy in ‘Street-level Bureaucracy’ focuses on the problem of front-line discretion but ‘brackets off’ the discretion of senior managers. In this paper I draw on a qualitative study to argue that senior managers can also exercise significant discretion and that their discretion can contribute to the conditions of policy confusion and contradiction, and resource inadequacy that characterise ‘the corrupted world of service’ of front-line discretion. In this context front-line discretion may be used by front-line staff to bridge the policy implementation gap created by senior managers.

A case of mistaken identity? Debating the dilemmas of street-level bureaucracy with Musil et al.

Lipskys Street-level Bureaucracy (Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1980) has exerted a strong influence on the study of public service organisations. There has been a growing interest in using this perspective to understand the organisational context of social work and Musil et al.s article in the EJSW (2004, ‘Do social workers avoid the dilemmas of work with clients?’, European Journal of Social Work, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 305–319) reflects this interest. Musil et al. argue that it is possible to identify two forms of practitioner response to the constraints of street-level bureaucracies: adapting working practices in ways that disadvantage service users or challenging working conditions in order to achieve more professionally acceptable practice. Their contribution to the debate is helpful, particularly with regard to their identification of responses by practitioners that seek to advance the interests of service users. However, we view their approach as constrained by lack of consideration of the construction of social work roles within particular street-level bureaucracies. We suggest that Lipskys work should be approached as a tentative analytic framework, rather than as a fixed model and we argue that a productive approach to research on social workers as street-level bureaucrats is conjunctural analysis. Such analysis examines the contexts, circumstances and statuses of practitioners and how these factors shape the specific forms of street-level practice that operate in particular organisational settings. We illustrate this in our discussion of the factors that are likely to have had a bearing on the two practice settings used as case studies by Musil et al.

Complexities of discretion in social services in the third sector

Policy analysts have devoted considerable time to examining the problem of the policy implementation gap, with one important strand in the literature following Michael Lipskys work on street-level bureaucracy and discretion. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the literature concerning shifts in government/third sector organisation contractual arrangements and whether they constitute a significant (post-neoliberal) development in policy implementation. Using a case study of contracted government services in Australia, we revisit the conception of discretion to reflect on the impact of these changes and document their implications for the use of discretion in management and front-line worker practices.

Confidentiality in Mental Health Services A Negotiated Order

The negotiated order perspective developed from the study of informal practices in mental health hospitals. It has subsequently become an influential perspective in the study of organizations. This article looks at its continuing relevance to understanding the way in which mental health services operate. Since the original study was published, mental health care has been transformed, with a move in the Western world to deinstitutionalized care and an increasingly managerial approach within human services organizations. The research reported here looks at confidentiality within mental health services in Britain in order to explore the continuing relevance and limitations of the negotiated order perspective. The study examines the confidentiality practices of mental health professionals from the point of view of service users. Seventeen service users were interviewed to ascertain their experience of confidentiality practices in their encounters with health and social services, and to identify their evaluation and response to these encounters. The study suggests the continuing relevance of the negotiated order perspective in terms of understanding professional practices, but also underlines the need to understand negotiation as an active set of practices involving service users as well as professionals.

International travelling knowledge in social work: an analytical framework

Social work has a shared international identity but is also diverse and context specific. There is increasing interest in the international movement of knowledge to national and local contexts but at present there is little analysis of how and why this happens. Instead of seeing knowledge as ‘transferred’ in a straightforward export–import relationship, attention needs to be paid to how knowledge is assembled, mobilised, circulated, reformulated and reassembled as it travels from one country to another. Drawing on neo-institutionalism, a comprehensive framework is proposed that may serve as a heuristic for researching and analysing international travelling knowledge in social work. It includes nine elements: narratives, routes, barriers, boundaries, filters, providers, shape, roots and issues/topics.

Understanding the carers’ experience: Examples from a Ghanaian context

Informal carers play a key role in mental health care.This article draws on the work of Goffman to analyse the experiences of carers in Ghana. The findings illustrate the complex nature of caring and the need to develop social work practice that acknowledges the social context of carers’ reality.

The ethics of practical reasoning—exploring the terrain

ABSTRACT Social work has been under sustained scrutiny regarding the quality of decision-making. The assumption is that social workers make poor quality decisions. And yet our knowledge and understanding of how social workers make decisions is, at best, partial. In our view, examination of practitioner decision-making will be enhanced by considering the role that ethics plays in practical judgement in practice. Although there has been significant work regarding the role of values and ethics in practice, this work tends to idealize morality, setting up external standards by which practice is judged. In this paper, we will argue that ethics in practice needs to be understood as more than simply the operationalizing of ideal standards. Ethics also entails critical engagement with social issues and can challenge idealized statements of values. We outline the idea of the ethical dimension of practical reasoning, consider its relationship to professional discretion, judgements and decision-making and argue that this opens up an area of investigation that can illuminate the interaction between practice and ethical thinking and reflection in novel and – for social work, at least – unconventional ways.

Special issue: Travelling knowledge in social work

The origin of this special issue lies in a series of questions about social work knowledge. Discussions about knowledge in social work tend to focus on the application of theory and research in pra...