Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'The governing of social work'

For many years, Sweden has had a reputation for having a comprehensive and women friendly welfare state. However, as in many other European countries during the past few decades, the organization and governing of welfare has undergone profound changes. Through interviews with social workers and the application of theories of governmentality, this thesis analyzes the expressions and consequences of such current organization and governing. One result is that the introduction of meticulous documentation practices of social workers contact with clients, regulate their interaction and constitute a control over both client and social worker. Another result is that the current organization fragments labor and awards more authority to managers, which functions to produce loyalty to the organization and management, rather than clients. This is expressed in demands not to voice protest, as it is said to create a bad mood. It is also expressed in demands to spend as little as possible on clients; short duration of treatment, preference for outpatient treatment and by making it difficult to receive financial support. This austerity is legitimized through the intermeshing of different ideals; budget awareness, evidence that supports short and outpatient treatment and that clients in order to change their course of life should to be allowed or coerced into taking individual responsibility. Another important finding is that the current governing and organization of social work produce distance and detachment, and thus discourage caring subjects. This is a complex process in which an assemblage of different techniques and rationalities undermines the cultivation of a relationship between social worker and client. 1) The ideal of evidence-based practice favors rigid methods over a flexible and holistic approach. 2) Ideals of rationality, closely connected to notions of masculinity and professionalism, value objectivity and devalue and deter the surfacing of emotions. 3) Meticulous practices of documentation reduce the amount of time available to meet clients. 4) Ideals and particular methods designed to promote individual responsibility in clients legitimize social workers distancing themselves from clients’ dependency and needs. 5) A division of labor, in either assessment or treatment, reduces time spent with clients for those who work with assessment and ultimately engage in the rationing of resources. 6) Standardized digital templates, installed to aid in assessments, regulate and proceduralize interactions with the client. 7) Austerity, heavy workloads, individualized responsibility and stress further accentuate distance, as detachment becomes a means to cope with arduous working conditions. The transformation of social work described above produces alienation and a fragmentation of social workers’ collective subjects. Simultaneously, an ethos of caring makes some social workers work extra hard to provide for clients, which ultimately covers for flaws in the system. Although such an ethos of caring allows for the further exploitation of social workers, it is also understood as a means of resistance, which in turn also forms the basis for organized resistance.
Sverige har ett internationellt rykte för att ha en omfattande och kvinnovänlig välfärd. Även om riktigheten i en sådan uppfattning sedan länge ifrågasatts har på senare år, likt i många andra Europeiska länder, det svenska välfärdssystemet genomgått en omfattande förändring i avseende på dess räckvidd, men också dess organisering och styrning. Fokus för denna studie är just denna organisering och styrning, och mer specifikt, hur detta påverkar ett av välfärdens kanske mest centrala område: socialt arbete. Genom att intervjua socialarbetare undersöks i denna studie uttryck för och konsekvenser av en sådan förändring, bland annat genom att undersöka hur könsbundna föreställningar och förväntningar är sammanflätade med det sociala arbetets organisering och styrning. I studien konstateras att socialarbetare erfar att deras arbete genomgått omfattande förändringar, vilket kopplas ihop med både organiseringen och styrningen av det sociala arbetet. Detta uttrycks både i de ideal som kringgärdar arbetet men också i dominerande arbetssätt. En sådan förändring är införandet av  omfattande dokumentationsprocedurer av socialarbetarens arbete och kontakt med klienter, vilket medför att kontakten med klienterna blir ytligare. Dokumentationsprocedurerna utgör också en sorts kontroll av både klienterna och socialarbetarna själva. En annan förändring som konstateras är att nya organisationsmodeller och en förändrad ledarskapskultur skapar förväntningar på socialarbetarna att vara lojala med organisationen och ledningen snarare än klienterna. Bland annat utrycks detta genom förväntningar att inte protestera och skapa dålig stämning på arbetsplatsen, men också genom uttalade krav att spendera så lite resurser som möjligt på klienterna; korta behandlingstider, öppenvårdsalternativ och orimligt hårda krav för att få ekonomiskt bistånd. Detta legitimeras genom sammanväxningen av flera olika ideal; budgetmedvetenhet, att klienter inte mår bra av långa institutionsvistelser, men också att klienterna ska tillåtas eller bör tvingas att klara att sig själva. Ett av studiens huvudresultat är att den nuvarande organiseringen och styrningen av socialt arbete skapar avstånd och likgiltighet. Genom flera sammankopplade ideal och arbetssätt styrs dagens socialarbetare till att bry sig mindre om de klienter de möter. På så sätt undermineras förutsättningarna för framväxten av en djup relation mellan socialarbetare och klient; 1) Idealet och kravet att socialarbetare ska arbeta utifrån evidens, det vill säga metoder och förhållningssätt som i speciellt utformade utvärderingsmodeller visat sig ha effekt, gör att väl strukturerade och rigida metoder ges företräde. Denna instrumentalisering underminerar ett flexibelt, relationsorienterat och helhetsfokuserat sätt att arbeta. Dessutom gör evidensidealets fokus på enskilda individer och avgränsade utvärderingstider att mer samhällsinriktat kritiskt och långsiktigt inriktat arbete undermineras. 2) Ett rationalitetsideal, tätt sammanbundet med föreställningar om professionalitet och maskulinitet, värderar objektivitet och förmågan att frikoppla socialarbetarens egna känslor från sitt arbete. Detta maskuliniserade professionsideal innebär att empati och solidaritet med klienten undergrävs. 3) Omfattande krav på olika former av dokumentation av det sociala arbetet gör att tiden som socialarbetaren har till sitt förfogande för att besöka och att ha möten med klienten blir knapp. 4) Ett allmänt samhällsideal kring individuellt ansvar och en särskild arbetsmetod (motiverande samtal) som många socialarbetare förväntas lära sig, framhäver klientens eget ansvar för och vilja till förändring. Detta legitimerar ett avståndstagande från klientens behov av hjälp och stöd enligt logiken  ”du måste klara detta själv”. 5) En vanligt förekommande uppdelning av socialarbetarnas arbetsuppgifter i en så kallad beställar-utförarmodell gör att vissa socialsekreterare arbetar med hjälp och stöd, medan andra arbetar med bedömningar av klienters behov. De senare, som också har inflytande över resurstilldelning, blir med en sådan organisering av arbetet alltmer frikopplade från den stödjande och hjälpande verksamheten och kontakten med klienten. 6) Standardiserade digitala bedömningsinstrument, skapade för att på ett likvärdigt sätt bedöma klienters behov och dokumentera det sociala arbetet, reglerar och instrumentaliserar kontakten med klienter. 7) Tunga arbetsbördor, individualiserat ansvar och stress, bidrar ytterligare till att skapa avstånd och likgiltighet eftersom det för vissa utgör ett sätt att genomleva en ohållbar arbetssituation. En allmän åtstramning av socialtjänstens resurstilldelning förstås som en viktig orsak till behovet av att skapa ovan distansmekanismer. Men distansen hänger också ihop med en tendens till ett återupplivande av en tidigare dominerande förståelse av marginalisering och sociala problem; där människors nöd ses som ett utslag av dålig karaktär och ett resultat av dåliga individuella val. De förändringar av det sociala arbetets premisser som beskrivits ovan gör att socialarbetarna alltmer görs främmande inför sitt arbete – de alieneras. Detta främmandegörande uttrycks genom att inte kunna identifiera sig med arbetet självt, sina kollegor eller med sig själv. Ett sådant främmandegörande underminerar, eller fragmentiserar, både relationen till klienten, men också en känsla av gemenskap med andra socialarbetare. En gemenskap som kan utgöra ett ”vi” och ligga till grund för att ställa krav, protestera och göra motstånd mot avhumaniserande ideal och reformer. På så vis är främmandegörandet inte bara en konsekvens av dagens organisering och styrning, utan också något som fyller en viktig funktion för en sådan styrning och organisering, och genomförandet av en allmän åtstramning i socialpolitiken. Samtidigt som dagens organisering och styrning av socialt arbete är främmandegörande, slår vissa socialarbetare knut på sig själva och arbetar extra hårt för att täcka upp för systemets brister och krympande resurser, för att trots det svåra läget ändå försöka ge det stöd som de upplever att klienten behöver. Ett sådant historiskt förankrat femininiserat omsorgsideal, dvs känslor av ansvar och empati inför behövande och en ilska inför oförrätter, utgör därmed på samma gång grund för en fördjupad exploatering av socialarbetarna, och ett vardagligt motstånd mot rådande system. I ett läge när flera upplever att kollegialiteten som grund för motstånd på arbetsplatserna underminerats, utgör ett sådant omsorgsideal samtidigt också grunden för organiserat motstånd utanför arbetsplatsen, bortom chefernas insyn, kontroll och härskartekniker. Medan nuvarande styrningssystem underminerar ett visst sorts motstånd, uppstår samtidigt grunden för nya.

Fallet ”Lilla hjärtat” föranledde en granskning samt en förändringsprocess av socialnämndernas sätt att arbeta med tvångsvård av barn. Förloppet som följde ledde fram till promemorian Barnets bästa när vård enligt LVU upphör som är framtagen av en utredare på Socialdepartementet. Utredaren presenterade fyra förslag på förändring av lagstiftningen som ämnar att stärka barnets bästa. Jag har genomfört en diskursanalys av promemorian med utgångspunkt i forskningsfrågan: Hur påverkar en specifik händelse, omdebatterad såväl medialt som politiskt, det sociala arbetets styrning? Det är tydligt att de lagförslag som utredaren presenterar har en påtaglig koppling till socialnämndens hantering och debatten kring fallet Lilla hjärtat. Därtill präglas promemorian av en rättslig diskurs som i och med översättningsprocessen från det sociala arbetets praktik till en rättslig praktik förenklar representationen av problemet vilket resulterar i att socialarbetarens maktposition befästs medan barn framställs som passiva mottagare av stöd och skydd. Om lagförslagen antas kommer de påverka den enskilda socialarbetarens handlingsutrymme inom området tvångsplacering av barn.
The case "Lilla hjärtat" led to an evaluation of the social welfare committees' way of working with compulsory care of children. The process that followed led to the memorandum “The child's best interests when care according to LVU ceases” prepared by an investigator at the Ministry of Social Affairs. The investigator presented four proposals for changes in the legislation that aim to strengthen the best interests of the child. I have conducted a discourse analysis of the memorandum based on the research question: How does a specific event, debated both in the media, and politically, affect the governance of social work? It is clear that the legislations presented by the investigator have a strong connection to the Social Welfare Board's handling of the case and the debate surrounding the case Lilla hjärtat. Moreover, the memorandum is characterized by a legal discourse which, through the translation process from social work practice to a legal practice, simplifies the representation of the problem, which results in the social worker's position of power being consolidated while children are portrayed as passive recipients of support and protection. If adopted, the legislations will affect the individual social worker's capacity of action in the area of child protection.

Den här studien handlar om att lyfta och se på inkludering som fenomen i förskolans utomhusmiljö. Detta genom att se på vad pedagogerna beskriver kring hur fenomenet kommer till uttryck. Syftet är att fånga pedagogernas uppfattning kring vilka faktorer som samverkar för att inkludering ska komma till uttryck genom autoetnografisk metod.  Detta genom att se på vad de beskriver och hur de implementerar inkludering i förskolans utomhusmiljö. Resultatet visar att många faktorer tillsammans påverkar hur fenomenet inkludering framträder. I studien beskrivs faktorerna som framkommit och teman de härleder till. Studien visar att inkludering som fenomen landar i att var och en som är deltagare i den utomhusmiljö de befinner sig i, måste lära sig finnas i den unika situationen. Därigenom sker implementering av inkludering.  Finnas, handlar om att ta vara på varje barns unika upplevelse. Inkludering kan inte existera utan något som ger det en mening. Pedagogerna påverkas av förskolans utomhusmiljö och de objekt som finns tillgängligt, vilket speglas i deras synsätt. Pedagogerna belyser inkludering, utefter den diskurs de befinner sig i. Vi blir där vi är.
This study is about raising and looking at inclusion as a phenomenon in the preschool's outdoor environment. This is done by looking at what the educators describe about how the phenomenon is expressed. The purpose is to capture the educators' perception of factors that work together for inclusion to be expressed through autoethnographic methods. This by looking at what they describe and how they implant inclusion in the preschool's outdoor environment. The results show that many factors together affect how the phenomenon of inclusion emerges. The study describes the factors that have emerged and the themes they derive from. The study shows that inclusion as a phenomenon lands in that whoever is a participant in the outdoor environment they are in, must learn to exist in the unique situation. This implements inclusion. Existence is about taking advantage of each child's unique experience. Inclusion cannot exist without something that gives it meaning. The educators are affected by the preschool's outdoor environment and the objects that are available, which is reflected in their point of view. The educators shed light on inclusion, according to the discourse they are in. We become where we are.

När förskolebarn föreställer sig att de är vilda mustanger som hoppar runt stolar och bord, brukar läraren ingripa i dessa lekar. Styrningen av barns lek är så djupt förankrad i förskolans dagliga rutin att den tenderar att ses som normal och legitimerad, vilket föranleder behovet av att studera denna förgivet tagna praktik. Syftet med denna uppsats är tvåfaldigt. Först så ämnar uppsatsen studera barns karnevaliska lek inom ramen för förskolan. Vidare så syftar den problematisera den vardagliga styrningen av sådan lek genom ett alternativt perspektiv, nämligen governmentalitet – synonymt med styrnings-rationalitet. För att uppnå dessa mål har barns lek studerats genom observationer, tytts som karnevalisk, och därefter analyserats. Regleringen av lek styrs genom styrningsstekniker såsom disciplinering, tid, övervakning, dokumentation, vallning, samt syndabekännelse. De syftar till att forma ett barn som följer rutiner och bekänner sina synder. Trots att karnevalisk lek utsätts för dessa diskreta styrningstekniker, gör den att förskolans ordning omkullvälts via sina element av transgression, absurditet och spontanitet.

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The growing interconnectedness of nations through globalization, and the threat of international terrorism as a destabilizing force, has increased the international community's concern for stable governance in the developing world. In an era of globalization, with near instantaneous information flow, and a global court of international opinion, the options for governing a society in a post-conflict environment are limited. History is filled with rebellions, insurgencies, coups, invasions, and occupations, which result in regime change or some sort of postconflict intervention by the international community. In each case, prior to conflict, there was an established order, or form of governance. After conflict a new order, or form of governance, has to emerge. In these societies a preconflict political and social order was disrupted, and a new post-conflict political and social order established. Ideally, the crafting of a new political and social order into effective governance requires the acceptance of the governed. As the United States remains committed to assisting nations with establishing governance and fostering stability, policymakers should consider the social acceptance of a post-conflict government by the people.

School governing bodies in England have considerable formal powers and responsibilities. This qualitative research study explored their concrete practices drawing on understandings of deliberative democracy and citizenship as sensitising concepts. The empirical research was broadly ethnographic and took place in two primary and two secondary maintained schools. Data was generated primarily from interviews and observations. Considering school governors from the perspectives of deliberative democracy and citizenship draws attention to ambivalences and ambiguities in their role. These ambivalences and ambiguities cover issues of agency, representation, exclusion, knowledge and a singular conception of a ‘common good’. Firstly, despite their busy-ness, governors are largely passive in relation to decision making and dissensus can be socially awkward. Consensus is underpinned by a singular conception of the ‘common good’. Secondly, the voices of certain governors are marginalised. Some governors are positioned as representatives and their constitution as partial masks the partiality of all governors. Thirdly, there are ambiguities in relation to the valuing of different knowledges. Educational knowledge is valued but also inflected by managerial knowledge. The policy emphasis on the value of managerial knowledge and measurable data tends to displace other possible ‘lay’ knowledges. Fourthly, education and governing are constituted as apolitical and there is limited discussion of educational aims, principles and values. In all this, despite policy describing governors as ‘strategic’, their work is largely technical and operates within a constrained national performative system that renders alternative conceptions of ‘good’ education unsayable or unthinkable. These ambivalences and ambiguities operate, together with a dominant discourse of skills and effectiveness, to obscure possibilities for thinking otherwise about education.

Recent calls for a critical geographical approach to public health have facilitated an engagement with a new range of research topics and methodologies, of which obesity is a particularly prescient example. This thesis aims to first, examine and compare obesity's historical emergence in the UK and US through three conceptual spheres: governmentality the political economy of food and cultural anthropologies of consumption. Second, this work questions what obesity, as both a biomedical epidemic and one of meanings, reveals about the tensions inherent within neo-liberal governance in the two countries through examples of obesity prevention measures in London and Austin, Texas. This work charts and critically interrogates the emergence of a global epidemic of obesity in the last two decades with reference to the 'obesity studies' literature. This discussion then backgrounds an analysis of relevant policy documents and newspaper coverage showing how the biomedical epidemic has been rhetorically employed to create an "epidemic of signification", legitimating public health intervention. The UK Labour government has recently promised to "support informed choice", while in the US, the doctrine of "personal responsibility" with regards to health has been at the fore of obesity prevention policy. These epistemological differences are explored through findings from semi-structured stakeholder interviews, health survey data, censuses and market research. In the light of such discussions, the three conceptual spheres are revisited to compare and contrast the case study findings and investigate the tensions at work within UK and US neo-liberal governance. The thesis concludes that obesity is not a universal or generalisable global epidemic, but exhibits distinct and localised risk factors, health outcomes and costs that are inextricable from the wider systems of governance that both frame and manage the condition.

It will be argued that, in order to understand particular exchanges between social workers and clients, it is essential to go beyond the view that sees them simply in terms of interaction between unique persons, and locate them within the wider discursive settings within which they occur. Most of the talk which takes place in these interviews concerns problematic issues within family life, particularly in terms of the relationships between parents and children. Behind these apparently mundane conversations lie agendas of social work issues which have been constructed historically with the rise of the caring professions. The early part of the thesis is concerned with uncovering the historically constructed norms of acceptable motherhood which underpin social work strategies with families and which help set the agendas of interviews. Then the analysis focuses on how general norms and objectives are translated into operational, professional techniques. This theme is carried forward through a focus on the social settings in which interviews take place, the building up of subject positions within interviews, for social worker and client, and the implications of translating from a predominantly oral to a literate based, professional mode of discourse. Finally, the analysis is concerned with the tentative attempts, marked by ambiguity and resistance, to go beyond the mere monitoring of the life of the client, and draw her/him into a form of discourse which is openly committed to social work aims, where the client seems to want to present his or her life problems in terms which are intelligible to, and manageable within, the strategies open to the social worker.

The dissertation analyzes labour market projects co-financed by the European Social Fund (ESF) targeting unemployed migrants and ethnicized groups. The analysis is qualitative, discourse-oriented and based on Foucault’s concept of governmentality. More specifically, it is highlighted how the target groups are ethnicized through discourses of employability and learning. The thesis consists of four articles. In the first three articles, focus is mainly on how the projects present themselves through their project descriptions in the ESF project bank and the fourth article is mainly based on ethnographic material. Overall, this dissertation highlights different aspects of inclusion work directed towards migrants and ethnicized target groups that can be seen as problematic and sometimes contradictory. Tendencies to individualize unemployment and thus positioning the unemployed project participants as responsible for their situation is interrogated in the thesis. Further, it is analyzed how culture and ethnicity is used in ways that are likely to strengthen the target groups ‘Otherness’ in relation to a ‘Swedishness’ that often become synonymous with what is perceived as normal and thus widening the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’ when the stated goal is the opposite. This dissertation can serve as a starting point to reflect on how inclusion efforts and labour market projects seeking to produce social inclusion and employability may be at risk to categorize people in different ways, which can sometimes be problematic in relation to what the efforts seek to achieve.
I avhandlingen studeras arbetsmarknadspolitiska åtgärder, i form av projekt finansierade av Europeiska socialfonden (ESF), riktade mot arbetslösa migranter och etnifierade grupper. Analysen är kvalitativ, diskursorienterad och utgår från Foucaults begrepp governmentality. Mer specifikt belyses hur projektens målgrupper etnifieras genom diskurser om anställningsbarhet och lärande. Avhandlingen består av fyra artiklar. I de tre första artiklarna fokuseras främst hur projekten framställer sig själva genom projektbeskrivningar i ESFs projektbank och den fjärde artikeln utgår främst från etnografiskt material. Sammantaget belyser avhandlingen olika aspekter - som kan ses som problematiska och ibland motsägelsefulla - av inkluderingsarbete riktat mot migranter och etnifierade målgrupper. Det handlar om tendenser att individualisera arbetslösheten och därmed i hög grad ansvariggöra de arbetslösa projektdeltagarna för sin situation. Det handlar också om att använda kultur och etnicitet på ett sätt som riskerar att förstärka målgruppernas ’annorlundahet’ i relation till den ’svenskhet’ som inte sällan blir synonymt med vad som uppfattas som normalt och på så sätt vidga gapet mellan ’vi’ och ’dem’ när den uttalade målsättningen är det motsatta. Avhandlingen kan fungera som en utgångspunkt för att reflektera kring hur inkluderingsinsatser och arbetsmarknadsprojekt riskerar att sortera och kategorisera människor på olika sätt, som kan vara problematiska i relation till vad insatserna vill uppnå.

The Swedish public sector has undergone major changes over the last decades, with increased demands to be effective and perform their tasks with high quality, but also with the demand to increase the influence of users and citizens over the support given. This development has influenced how social services organise and how their work is perform, and is one motive given as to why evidence-based practice was introduced. This development can also be traced back to the manager philosophy new public management and neo-liberalism. Evidence-based practice has its origin in evidence-based medicine, which had a large impact internationally from the 1990s.Although there are different opinions concerning how evidence-based practiceshould be understood is often described on the basis of Sackett et al.’s (2000) definition which regards evidence-based practice as an integration of different knowledge sources – the best evidence, clinical or professional expertise and the values and preferences of users. The professional have the responsibility to use all these knowledge sources in the daily work.The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyse different processes of the introduction of evidence-based practice. One aspect is what these processes have contributed to in terms of organising ways of working and management within social services; another aspect concerns what this means for social work. With a combination of new institutional organisational theory and Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) insights into the social construction of everyday life, it is possible to analyse the introduction of evidence-based practice as a process, moving between a macro, meso and micro perspective. The empirical base for this thesis is interviews with 33 personnel from different professions and organisations. Those interviewed from thesocial services include social workers within individual and family services and socialservices managers, as well as regional representatives from a Research and Development Unit. To understand the development of evidence-based practice and its proliferation into social services I also interviewed doctors from health care in a County Council.New institutional organisational theory is useful for understanding how differentways of organising activities are spread between and within organisations. With concepts used in new institutional theory, the focus is on how evidence-based practice travels from medicine to social work, and from a national level to the local social services level, via the regional level. Giddens (1990) terms ‘disemedding’ and ‘reembedding’ are used. Different isomorphic processes are recognised in these processes, as well as strategies to decouple or loosely couple evidence-based practice from social services ordinary activities as a way to gain legitimacy. The main findings in the thesis are that evidence-based practice has been introduced with evidence-based medicine as a role model, and that this has been done from different conditions. As is described in the interviews, the development of evidencebased practice has been controlled from national organisations such as the government, the National Board of Health and Welfare and in recent years also the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Region, while the development within the medical area was governed by national organisations but performed by the medical profession, which advocated the introduction of evidence-based practice within the profession. The regional representatives largely support the myth that is presented of evidence-based practice, and have a central responsibility in the national initiativesconducted; they are intermediary between the national initiatives on development work and the local practice. When evidence-based practice is introduced in social work this has entailed loosely coupling between the myth about evidence-based practice and the ordinary activities, this strategy is especially obvious among social services managers. Furthermore, when a medical model of evidence-based practice is used, although with a broader approach, the introduction of evidence-based practice does not reflect the social workers’ education, profession and ways of working in the same way as evidence-based medicine reflects the doctors’ education, profession andway of working. The intention to analyse the introduction of evidence-based practice from a micro perspective is about understanding how evidence-based practice is received by the social worker and their managers. When the interviews with the doctors, social workers and managers are analysed there is less coherence between evidence-based practice and social workers’ work than between evidence-based medicine and doctors’ work. This means that social workers have to shape and construct their daily work anew through internalising the new habits and routines into everyday work, something that takes energy and time, which most interviewees feel does not exist.This thesis also highlights the need for social work to approach evidence-based practice both at an organisational and a structural level, and from the level where the daily work is performed by social workers. Finally, there exists among almost all interviewees a great interest in introducing evidence-based practice, especially among the social workers, but at the moment it is not re-embedded in social work.

Godkänd; 2014; 20140731 (beneli); Nedanstående person kommer att disputera för avläggande av filosofie doktorsexamen. Namn: Benitha Eliasson Ämne: Arbetsvetenskap/Human Work Science Avhandling: Social Work Approaching Evidence-Based Practice Rethinking Social Work Opponent: Professor of Health Care Organisation Mike Dent, Faculty of Health Sciences, Staffordshire University, Storbritannien Ordförande: Professor Elisabeth Berg, Avd för arbetsvetenskap, Institutionen för ekonomi, teknik och samhälle, Luleå tekniska universitet Tid: Måndag den 29 september 2014, kl 13.00 Plats: A109, Luleå tekniska universitet

The diffuse runoff of agricultural nutrients, also called agricultural nonpoint source pollution (NPS), is a widespread threat to freshwater resources. Despite decades of research into the processes of eutrophication and agricultural nutrient management, social, economic, and political barriers have slowed progress towards improving water quality. A critical challenge to managing agricultural NPS pollution is motivating landowners to act against their individual farm production incentives in response to distant ecological impacts. The complexity of governing the social-ecological system requires improved understanding of how policy shapes farmer behavior to improve the state of water quality. This dissertation contributes both theoretically and empirically to NPS pollution governance by examining the impacts of water quality policy design on farmer nutrient management decision making and behavior. In the first study, I theoretically contextualize the issue of agricultural NPS pollution in the broader discussion of environmental public goods dilemmas to suggest that an increased focus on the link between policy and behavior can improve sustainable resource management. I propose two empirical approaches to study the policy-behavior link in environmental public goods dilemmas: 1) explicit incorporation of social psychological and behavioral variables and 2) utilization of actor mental models, or perceptions of the world that guide decision making, to identify behavioral drivers and outcomes. In the second and third studies, I then use these approaches to examine how water quality policies for agricultural NPS collectively change farmer behavior to reduce nutrient emissions. The second chapter uses a quantitative, survey-based approach to examine the relationship between mandatory policy design and behavior change in New Zealand. I find that a shift to mandatory policy is not immediately associated with increased adoption of nutrient management practices, but the mandatory policy design is important for potential future behavior change and long-term policy support. In the third study, I combine qualitative methodology with network analysis of qualitative data to examine a spectrum of agricultural NPS pollution policies in Vermont, USA and Taupo and Rotorua, New Zealand. I use farmer mental models to examine behavior change within each of the regions, the perceived drivers of behavior change and perceived outcomes of the policy. In this study, farmers across all three regions cite mandatory water policy as a key behavioral driver, but in each region, policy design interacts with the social-ecological context to produce distinct patterns of behaviors and perceived outcomes. Taken together, this dissertation demonstrates that agricultural NPS pollution policy design must consider the interactions between policy and other social-ecological behavioral drivers in order to achieve long term water quality improvements.

An exploration of the relationship between patterns of social interaction and social work practice which incorporates thirteen publications. The thread running throughout is the way in which new forms of social care practice are made possible by cross-boundary linkages. A 'Critical Review' sets the context and analyses the works. This is followed by the first published work which applies anthropological models to the study of social marginalisation. The second publication introduces the social network concept and investigates patterns of reciprocity and dependency in social care. The next section of the thesis consists of a 'commentary' on the Griffiths and Wagner Reports. This is followed by a closely related work arguing that there is a fundamental opposition between market and network models of social and community care. The thesis then looks at the ways the culture concept can be used to illuminate the cross-boundary practices associated with community care. The concept of culture and its relationship to cross-boundary working is developed more fully in the next section where it is argued that collaboration culture is paradoxical because it incorporates both respect for difference and a commitment to collective action and that resolving this paradox through collaborative work is a complex and skilled activity. The next section introduces a comparative dimension and suggests that studies of collaboration could be based on looking at the ways in which modern welfare systems try to solve the problem of potential fragmentation and lack of coherence. The work which follows on from this makes use of discourse analysis and network analysis to compare and contrast the rhetoric of partnership and collaboration with the way in which individuals think about their day-to-day cross-boundary work. This raises questions about the changing nature of working relationships in the field of social care and is followed by an investigation into the nature and effects of globalisation on social work in Europe. 'The Co-operation Concept in a Team of Swedish Social Workers' is an attempt to develop a cross-national framework for the analysis of community care focused on the cross-boundary networks of a team of hospital based social workers in Stockholm. The thesis then returns to somewhat broader concerns by means of a work which investigates the contribution of theories of social interaction to theories of social work. These concerns permeate the penultimate section on networking but in a more applied and specific way. The book which constitutes this section of the thesis argues that there is a distinctive theory of networking and that it can be applied to the whole range of social welfare and social care specialisms. The final work explores the impact of globalisation on the ways in which social workers currently experience their roles and develop their sense of professional identity.

ElectriCITY, a citizenship-driven economic association aims at making Hammarby Sjöstad the most climate-friendly district in Sweden. Their next step is to integrate urban agriculture into the neighborhood. Urban agriculture is, by definition, growing or producing food in a city. It allows, among other things, to increase access to locally grown food for the population nearby and to educate city dwellers on many aspects of agriculture. This project’s goal is to offer a large overview of urban agriculture and its different governance characteristics. In addition to the literature review and to have a better understanding of the relevant stakes of this field, the project was based on six different case studies that introduce various types of urban agriculture governance: SweGreen (Stockholm), Odlande Stadsbasarer (Stockholm), Nature Urbaine (Paris), the WandelGarten (Freiburg), the Tillsammansodling group of Viva (Gothenburg) and Greenhouse (Malmö). The study was built on desk studies, interviews, and two participant observations. It had a focus on the different governance characteristics of the urban agriculture approaches (internal, external, and contextual) based on a distinction between market-oriented projects and non-market-oriented ones. The findings showed similarities between the case studies on different points such as their approaches to sustainability or the need to have external partners and political support. They showed as well the importance to take into account the external and contextual factors for projects to be well-integrated into the urban system.

Family law in multi-religious settings poses a problem for gender equality. However, there is a need to learn more about the dynamics of this process and its effect on women's capacity for taking action. This thesis asks the following research question: 'How does the enactment of family laws impact on the ways women negotiate their personal relationships in post-conflict Lebanon?' Mainstream statutory and cultural explanations failed to analyse the gendering effect of family law for three reasons. First, these explanations dissociate legal frameworks from broader social norms. Second, they reduce gender equality to entitlements rather than outcomes. Third, they fix women's agency as static and one-dimensional. The thesis presents a broader view of the 'enacted' aspects of family laws and examines their impact as historically bound social institutions with a dynamic gendering effect. It uses qualitative research methods to examine the case of post-conflict Lebanon (1990-2005). Findings suggest that family law forms an order of 'gender governance' that sustains institutional gender inequality and restricts women's agency in three ways. At the judicial level, women's legal personhood is blurred in both legal texts and in judicial practice. At the normative level, women's subjectivity is confined within dominant gendered norms on family relations and womanhood ideals. Finally, at the level of social spaces for action, women are restricted in their individual and collective capacity for negotiating their rights. Hence, women's subjectivity is found to be composite and fluid continuously shaping various directions for agency beyond narrow western definitions of freedom. The thesis' main contribution is to argue for the need to engage more thoroughly with family law's institutional complexity and the processes of their enactment. The concept of 'gender governance' helps explain why women have so far been unable to organise effectively towards challenging or reforming family law. It also informs the complexity of citizenship in multi-religious settings by contextual ising the religious influence and framing it within political discourses on national identity and postconflict state building.

A crucial phenomenon during the last two decades has been the transformation of social governance. New orientations in social policy have radically altered the roles of the state, market and civil society in social provision. The thesis proposes a framework for understanding this transformation of social governance that links political leaders’strategic calculations to the particular political challenges they face as a result of changes in the socioeconomic environment as well as to the ideas and institutions that shape their reform attempts. Importantly, it shows how the “pluralist” social policy approach that was initiated by governments all over the developing world in the 1990s may lead to different modes of social governance with contrasting effects on statesociety relations. By drawing on a comparative analysis of Argentina and Chile, the thesis shows how this is highly contingent on regime institutions. In Argentina, regime institutions provide politicians with wide discretion in distributing social funds. The result has been a populist mode of social governance in which neo-clientelism serves to politicize the linkages between the political elites and subaltern sectors. In Chile, by contrast, regime institutions provide politicians with very little discretion in distributing social funds. This has resulted in a technocratic mode of social governance in which neo-pluralism serves to depoliticize the linkages between the political elites and subaltern sectors. Both outcomes differ markedly from widely made assumptions that couple the pluralist social policy approach with more participatory governance and poor people’s empowerment.

This thesis investigates the complex and heterogeneous regime of government resulting from the failure of the EU attempts to govern asylum seekers through the Dublin system and the harmonisation of reception conditions. Combining the analytical perspective of governmentality with a regime analysis which resembles those proposed by critical migration studies, the thesis aims to identify features and functioning of a possible EU government of asylum seekers, which is defined as EU reception regime. Through a rich empirical study primarily based on semi-structured interviews with a range of different actors in several contexts in Italy and Sweden, three key modes of operation of the regime are identified, which are: logistics, differentiation, and failure. Logistics denotes an increasing importance of operational and organisational concerns in the reception of asylum seekers, which pave the way to the commodification of reception and transform the regime into a reception industry. Differentiation concerns a mode of governing asylum seekers based on the arbitrary multiplication of treatments, conditions, and experiences, across as well as within states, which therefore makes the regime work as a reception roulette. Finally, failure is a key aspect of the regime which is both intrinsic to its functioning and productive, thus making the regime operate as a reception dispositif. In particular, the thesis shows how the failure of the regime to limit movements ends up “illegalising” them and consequently fostering conditions of invisibility, disposability, and vulnerability. In this way, it is argued, the EU reception regime assures an unlimited supply of cheap, precarious, and vulnerable labour for member states’ economies, thus allowing the incorporation of reception into the neoliberal logic of valorisation of mobility which informs the EU politics of migration management.

The need to try to work in partnership with parents during a child protection investigation is a legally-derived expectation of social work practice. Yet very few empirical studies have examined what social workers and their clients say to each other when parents are being assessed for the risk they might present to their children. The patterning of such talk, and how this might perform a range of activities is addressed in this thesis. Social work can be said to derive its practice from twin concerns with 'care' and 'control'. I describe the ways these themes are made relevant by participants in child protection investigations using an approach based on Conversation and Discourse Analysis. The main sources of data are transcriptions of audio recordings of six extended meetings between social workers and parents. The discourse of the worker-client meetings is examined for how it orients to, constitutes and makes relevant the participants' contrasting roles and responsibilities. A central analytic theme I consider is the conversational management of co-operation in social work. This arises out of my examination of research on the professional-client relationship in social work and also studies of institutional interactions in particular settings. Goffman's (1984) concept of 'footing' and Edwards and Potter's (1992) recent reworking of this within a 'discursive' approach to social psychology are enlisted among other sources to analyse the interactions. The series of analyses which I present show how local interactional difficulties are created by the professional's attempts to affiliate with parents. These are resolved sequentially and interactionally as the talk oscillates between various activities associated with the participants' accountability. I take social work to be constituted by the orientations of the participants to the control and care dimensions of child protection. Throughout the thesis, the aim is to validate my approach through a dialogue with other research studies and also through considering the participants' own orientations to the issues under discussion.

Conventional resource management pervades the practice of ecosystem governance and the performance of alternative models is inconsistent, particularly in developing country contexts. I argue for a perspective that focuses on enabling underlying principles of governance to improve a range of governance regimes. This thesis prioritises three principles of adaptive governance, namely, inclusive decision-making, diversity of ecological knowledge, and integration of complexity thinking. It examines how these are enabled or disabled in practice, and the implications for the legitimacy and effectiveness of management strategies, including marine protected areas, expected to secure resilience of desirable ecological configurations. An institutional analysis with a concern for power relations, socio-cultural practice, and historical social geographies is employed. Empirical data were collected from two marine social-ecological systems in Kenya, using a range of qualitative techniques. Mombasa Marine National Park and Reserve and Diani-Chale Management Area provide appropriately complex systems where interactions between individuals and their environment are intense and multi-faceted, and where interactions between actors differ between and within sites. These cases provide appropriate contexts for intricate and critical analysis. At the local level, actors' interactions and knowledge integration are mediated by a suite of institutional, socio-cultural, and historical factors. The behaviour of local actors is also strongly influenced by perceptions of ethics and collective rights. Forums for ethical debate and resolution of historical conflict \vithin the social-ecological systems are necessary to improve both the legitimacy and effectiveness of governance. \Vithin the coastal zone, a diversity of knowledge, which reflects complexity thinking to different extents, is available. However, the potential of inclusionary processes to facilitate environmental feedback into decisions made is severely curtailed by power dynamics and the inertia of national institutional reform. Nevertheless, opportunities for actors to interact in more democratic, inclusive and informative ways are emerging in practice, despite the prevalence of governance mechanisms founded on conventional thinking.

Since various public and private actors at the international, supranational, national and subnational levels started to adopt long-term targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, low-carbon scenario analyses have flourished. Literature reveals an increasing number of analyses envisioning and exploring alternative images of low-carbon futures, as well as their adjacent transition pathways. Scenario approaches or “foresight” is intended to help policy-makers to navigate the maelstrom of confusion and conflicts associated with highly complex societal challenges such as climate change – i.e. the “super-wicked” problems. Typical scenario exercises aim at coping with uncertainty and conflicting values, and hence are often claimed as a suitable approach for knowing and governing super-wicked problems. When reviewing the scenario literature published over the recent years, we observe significant methodological developments, in particular at the level of the calculus or data-sets. These contributions have generated an increasing technical sophistication of scenario building methods, and contrast with the relative absence of social sciences research on scenarios. Scenario analyses have received little academic attention from social sciences, whether they are political science, sociology, philosophy of science or science and technology studies. By providing a SHS-analysis of low-carbon scenarios, the present thesis contributes to bridge this research gap. Scenarios are here understood as “boundary objects” linking different social worlds: science and policy, but also natural and social sciences. This thesis aspires to create an enhanced understanding on how scenario analyses perform such “boundary work”. More specifically, the following analysis of low-carbon scenarios is based on a twofold perspective focusing, on the one hand, on the interactions between low-carbon scenarios and governance (i.e. link between science and policy), and, on the other hand, on the making of knowledge about governance in low-carbon scenarios (i.e. link between natural and social sciences). In other words, it explores “scenarios in governance” and “governance in scenarios”. The thesis project includes three research axes, each based on its particular empirics. A first study explores the interactions between low-carbon scenarios and governance on the basis of a multiple case study analysing the role of four energy foresight studies in policy-making. The other two studies focus on the making of knowledge about governance in low-carbon scenarios. One of them provides an assessment of the knowledge needed to steer the low-carbon transition. The other one aims at contributing to the debate on the relations between quantitative modelling and social sciences by exposing a critical review of socio-technical energy transition models. The objective of the present thesis thus consists in providing an empirical contribution to social sciences research on low-carbon scenarios.
Doctorat en Sciences
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This study focused on social work students’ views on the integration of religion in social work. This study allowed students to gain knowledge and insight on the importance of discussing religion with clients. The study examined social worker students’ experiences during their involvement in the social work program which looked into how prepared they were in situations where religion was necessary to discuss with clients and other outcomes. Qualitative interviews were conducted with ten participants who discussed their experiences in internships during their involvement within the social work program. Participants were in different years in the BASW and MSW program and were from various ethnicity, age, gender, and specializations. Main findings were that participants believed religion plays a huge role in clients’ everyday lives and that the social work program is not teaching students how to discuss religion with clients during their internships. Another finding was that a few social work students were not prepared to discuss clients’ religious practices. Agency employers also discouraged social work students from discussing clients’ religious practice. This study enhances the social work profession and allow social workers to better service diverse and cultural clients by highlighting the importance of religion in some clients’ lives. The social work profession can improve the quality of service that is given to clients that have a religious practice and can be assessed for appropriate services based on their individual needs. Social work students can learn to integrate this topic into their assessments.

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that the way groups or individuals tackle resource access and control problems does not always reflect identifiable institutional processes. This was tested through a case study of livelihoods and resource access problems of a Kenyan coastal community dependent on small scale fisheries. The structure of the study was based on the need to understand the context in which people live in order to interpret their behaviour. Each chapter sought to examine aspects of people's social and biophysical setting, paying particular attention to changes and causes of change. This involved a reconstruction of the community's historical relations with other groups in their area; socio-economic analysis of the livelihoods of different groups within the community; and social network analysis of people's actions in response to resource access and control problems. All groups within the community depended on a range of activities to provide food and income, but the role of fishing was dominant. Changes in local natural environments were shown to have led to a decrease in household productivity over the last five decades. This was attributed to colonialism, international development and cultural changes. This also led to increased effort in the sea, leading to overfishing. The overall socio-economic situation of the community was revealed as poor. Social network analysis showed that administrative and political actors were found to be more important than actors with a legal mandate to solve resource related problems. It was shown that formal institutions relating to natural resources stifled the process of problem resolution. Local people were found to use alternative processes, based on communication networks, to solve problems, thus supporting the hypothesis. The findings stress the importance of understanding local people's socio-economic and socio-political situation before developing resource management strategies. Resource managers could make use of social network analysis to identify and understand the roles of key people, groups and organisations.

This thesis investigates how collective action is achieved in the governance of transnational common pool resources, taking the example of the electromagnetic radio spectrum as a global common. The thesis asks what determines variation in operational and collective choice property arrangements in common pool resources such as the radio spectrum. The radio spectrum represents the totality of radio frequencies used for wireless communications around the world. It is a transnational resource that exhibits properties of other common pool resources: a) high rivalry in consumption and b) difficulty in excluding non-contributing beneficiaries from its use. This study demonstrates that the presence of a public actor – even one with established authority at transnational level such as the Commission of the European Union – cannot fully explain variations in the configuration of property arrangements in the radio resource. Instead, this study finds that private actors in the electronic communications industry – i.e. service operators and system developers – define rules of access and rules of use in the transnational radio resource, by means of negotiating the configuration of technology systems used to extract value from the resource. In addition, this study finds that industry actors are able to define common operational rules to access and use a transnational frequency pool even in complex situations of heterogeneous economic interests and heterogeneous technology capabilities. They reduce uncertainty in these complex situations by increasing participation in decision-making and by developing mechanisms of information exchange and mutual monitoring in industry associations. When industry actors agree these common rules of management, and reinforce them with common rules of exclusion, they are more likely to negotiate operational arrangements based on principles of common exclusive property rather than individual exclusive property in the transnational radio resource. These findings are derived from the analysis of four case studies, which trace the development of operational rules in five radio frequency bands across time. By revealing the central role of industry associations in defining property arrangements in transnational commons such as the radio spectrum, this research seeks to contribute to the debate about the nature and scope of private transnational governance of common goods.

This thesis investigates what can be gained by approaching social work reports and conversations as narratives. A conventional approach to social work accounting practices is to treat such documents as (more or less) accurate descriptions of social workers' clients, their problems and proposed remedies. Such a realist approach was found to be flawed, since it assumes straightforward access from accounts to external reality, not considering the constructedness of such documents. Drawing on theoretical themes from the sociology of scientific knowledge, literary theory, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics, this thesis explores the construction and reception of social work accounts as rhetorical, narrative and interactional processes. The documents analysed represent some of the occasions on which social workers describe and recommend social work intervention with children and their families - research interviews, court reports, internal memos, case file entries and journal reports. On these occasions, social work is performed and displayed in descriptions of people and their attributes, justifications for social work intervention and excuses for lack of success. The main theme of the thesis is that social work accounts can profitably be analysed as stories. To explain their work and their clients' world to a variety of audiences, social workers are heard to tell competent, professionally persuasive stories. A variety of storytelling features are explored, looking in particular at plot, character, the construction of the reader and the authority of the writer. Stories are heard to vary with reading occasions and critical audiences, and it is the study of reading relations which is a main focus of the analysis - to whom are these accounts addressed and how are they available to be read? Rhetorical features are investigated in order to understand how social work accounts are made available to be read as morally and factually persuasive. A critical reading is also offered, which questions the adequacy of the accounts, and makes available the possibility of reading unheard stories. Reflexive interludes comment on the claims of the thesis writer in terms of the efforts of the social work writer. The implications of this study are that treating social work accounts as textual accomplishments undermines social workers' claims for reporting objectively about their clients and their problems. Social work can be seen as constituted in and through the performance and reception of stories: doing competent social work is achieved through telling competent social work stories.

This critical review examines seven peer-reviewed papers reporting research related to aspects of social work education in England, carried out against the backdrop of reforms following the work of the Social Work Task Force. The review takes a reflexive approach to the task of demonstrating the doctoral qualities and credentials of the portfolio, that is, the papers and commentary together, drawing on ideas from critical realism to support this process. It discusses the papers individually, considering their limitations; their originality and impact at the time they were produced; and the contribution they make as a body of work. Acknowledging the challenges of retrospectively connecting the papers, the review identifies links between them in their relevance to professional identity. It suggests that attention should be given to the notion of collective professional identity, conceived of as a shared occupational social identity, but including the capacity for action in the face of threats or challenges, and in contributing to the development of the profession. The review argues that qualifying social work education in England located in the universities but connecting with practice via placements, provides an important space for the shaping, maintenance and articulation of a collective identity for social work.

Drinking water supply insecurity is globally on the rise, and prevalent in most low and middle-income urban areas. Multiple responses have emerged to cope with the lack of a reliable and equitable supply of safe and sufficient drinking water in cities, which presents a wide range of social-ecological implications. Yet, many of the analyses to date are focused on predominantly technological, ecological, and economic perspectives, overlooking broader cultural and political dimensions. What are the elements and the interrelationship between them that sustain the lack of drinking water supply security at an urban scale? The empirical case study is located in Mexico City, the capital city of one of the most drinking water-insecure countries globally and among the world’s five largest metropolitan areas. Qualitative data is elicited from a literature review and semi-structured interviews with key experts and urban stakeholders. The results provide an integrated understanding of the proposed system structure that created and maintain the water supply problem in the long-term. Hindrances include knowledge lock-ins and critical dynamics that inhibit the political support to transition towards a drinking water security scenario. This study shows that drinking water supply crisis in the study area and other cities with similar conditions need to be understood as multi-dimensional and from a system perspective, by challenging underlying assumptions and embracing interconnectedness. Key feedback mechanisms are presented in causal loop diagrams, allowing the exploration of higher-order leverage points to reduce existing path-dependencies as one increasingly important research area, and potentially relevant for decision-makers.

This study explores the field of social work values in the social work profession. The aim of the study is to explore how social work values are related to empowerment practices and organizational structures inside the social work field. By using the perspective of empowerment and professional doxa these structures inside the social work field are explored in interviews with nine social workers. These nine interviews show how social workers relate to values insides their profession, how empowerment practices are done, and what kind of organizational conflicts social workers may experience. By using the perspectives of empowerment and professional doxa the interviews been analysed and connected to both local and global concerns for the social work field. Many professional conflicts were found by taking these perspectives that are discussed in this study, as for example role conflicts social workers could experience. Other conflicts were those of structural failures that caused harm to client contacts and economic factors that were deemed more important for organizations than good client outcomes.

In this thesis, a phenomenological approach is taken as the purpose is to discuss how the healthcare experiences of Swedish patients with chronic illness are affected by political state reforms and governing technologies. The thesis compares the discourse of Swedish healthcare policy with the discourse of healthcare in practice. Swedish healthcare has gone through major changes during the past decades, which have affected the state-to-patient relationship. This shift involved a transfer of responsibility from the state to its citizens, enabled through patient empowerment. In this change, a new ideal patient-role emerged, which is the patient as an informed and active consumer. What this thesis shows is the existence of a discrepancy between the ideal patient-role in governmental writing and the same ideal patient-role in the reality of the healthcare system. The ethnography consists of a literature study of healthcare policy documents and interviews with ten informants about their experiences of healthcare, in connection with the chronic diseases that affected their lives. The aim has been to examine the governing qualities of healthcare policy and practice, implementing Foucault’s theory of governmentality and technologies of the self.

The research question underpinning this study is ‘How is learning organised within the context of social work practice in the third sector?’ The research objective is to establish conceptual frameworks that theorise the organisation of learning in this context. Drawing upon literatures from Organisational Behaviour, Management, Social Work, Sociology and Psychology (e.g., Ballew and Mink 1996; Foucault 1995; Mayer and Salovey 1997; Ouchi 1979; Weihrich 1982) and undertaking an ethnographic inquiry in the Old-Five-Old Foundation in Taiwan, which collects documents as secondary data and gathers primary data through participant observations and interviews, this study establishes interdisciplinary frameworks to answer this research question. It argues that practitioners’ learning is organised by five kinds of structuring forces. At the macro level, practitioners’ direction of learning is organised by service purchasers’ demanding (an inter-organisational level structuring force) and the service provider’s planning (an organisational level structuring force). The evaluation of practitioners’ learning is organised by the service provider’s monitoring (an organisational level structuring force). At the micro level, practitioners’ methods of learning are organised by practitioners’ puzzle solving and instructors’ instructing (individual level structuring forces). By looking at the macro and micro structuring forces (cross level analysis) that organise practitioners’ learning, including their direction and methods of learning and the evaluation of their learning (process analysis), this study systematically analyses the organising of learning through both a cross-level analysis and a process analysis, deepening an understanding of the organising of learning and thus making an original contribution to previous studies of learning in the organisational setting (e.g., Argyris and ch n 1978; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; Senge 1990; Wenger 1998, 2000).

This thesis explores the connection between policy creation and social work practices that are related to this policy. The main aim of the thesis is to fill a gap that exists in the research in relation to the connection between particular policies concerning the care and protection of children and the social work practices related to these. Primarily, I am interested in the experiences of social workers in community groups and the issues and problems they face in trying to integrate these policies into their everyday practice. The thesis presents four case studies that highlight the interactive relationship that exists between policy and practice. These case studies have been developed from the interviews I conducted with care and protection community workers in Christchurch in 1999. The first two case studies - the development of the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act (1989), and the process of devolution that occurred through the 1980s and 1990s - look at particular policy developments that have impacted on care and protection social work, and explore the way that policy creation and implementation is contingent on the specific time and place in which it is developed. The second two case studies - Family Group Conferences and Strengthening Families - focus on two quite different forms of social work practice and provide an insight into the way that policy is implemented and used by practitioners at ground level. These four case studies form the basis of an argument around the idea that policy and practice are dynamic and interactive processes that will inform and change one another. Rather than seeing policy as something that is created by bureaucrats in the state and applied by practitioners at the ground level, I argue that the policy process is more complex than this. The case studies provide practical examples of this idea, and explore the complexities of policy development and the relationship between policies, policy actors and specific community social work practices - an area about which there has been little research.

This thesis examines the role that emotions have within social work practice. The key tenets of the literature relating to emotions are considered and a conceptual framework is proposed which will provide a conceptual and definitional underpinning to the thesis. Emotions and emotional intelligence are located within wider social work literature, and links are established with reflective practice, relationships with service users, social work skills, policy, legislation and supervision. Social workers across a Scottish local authority were asked to respond to a survey questionnaire and a selected cohort from this sample participated in semi-structured interviews based on the emerging themes from the survey. The data reported a complex picture of the role of emotions with a key challenge being the place of emotions within constructs of ‘being professional’. There was strong evidence that the relationship based aspects of practice were felt to be important and that emotions often were a key element and a useful tool, but this was counterbalanced by a strong view that the emotional content of practice should be removed from the written articulation of practice and in some cases from supervision. The value of informal support from colleagues was highlighted in terms of ‘safety’ and accessibility. The discussion of the results examines the impact of competing contextual factors such as professional narratives and organisational culture on how social workers experience and report the emotional content of their practice, and an ‘emotional gap’ is identified whereby social workers adopt a dramaturgical response to how they present aspects of their practice. The conceptual framework is considered in relation to the findings, and it is concluded that emotions are an inescapable aspect of the individual and collective experience of social work, in spite of the aforementioned contextual issues. Conclusions and implications for practice are drawn, and a model is developed which identifies the cultural and organisational shift required to reduce the perceived disjuncture between emotions and social work as a profession.

Alienation theory has been underused in research on workplace and wellbeing. This thesis therefore seeks to apply alienation theory to a study of the wellbeing of social workers. The specific objectives were as follows: 1) to identify potential causes of alienation among social workers who are employed in the public sector. 2) to analyse how those alienating experiences condition the wellbeing of those social workers. 3) to critically assess the utility of alienation theory in researching wellbeing in the workplace. A Marxist methodology was deployed in this research, which sought to analyse critical dynamic and dialectic relations between surface phenomena and deeper structural relations inhered within capitalism. This was achieved by subjecting data to a two-step analysis where data was (1) initially analysed in accordance with standard procedures before (2) incorporating the results from that analysis into a dialectical whole which seeks to identify the network of relations that give rise to surface phenomena. Semi-structured interviews with 16 social workers working in a variety of services provide the empirical basis of the research. The study found instances of historically situated alienation among social workers animated by a series of contradictions in their working lives and in their relations with service users. Those alienating experiences impacted on wellbeing in two related ways. First, the social workers experienced frustration and disillusionment at not being able to enact their professional skills in their work due to a lack of autonomy and control in their working lives. Second, the alienating and contradictory experiences accrued over time led to a 'crash point where wellbeing and health were highly compromised. Overall, the main advantages of applying alienation theory was that guided research into workplace wellbeing that reached beyond limited psychological constructs of stress and instead sought to find causal structural relations.