… these two elements are closely linked. Specifically, replacement of human by non- human technology is often oriented towards greater control. The great source of uncertainty and unpredictability in a rationalizing system are people – either the people who work within those systems or the people who are served by them (Ritzer, 1993, p148).
Each employee in McDonald’s is drilled in what to say and how to say it. The production process which brings the Big Mac onto your tray is pre-packaged, pre-measured, auto- matically controlled. Both the employee who serves the meal and to an increasing extent the consumer are not required to think, just follow the instructions or see what others do in the queue.
This process therefore is ethically problematic as our skills and capabilities are diminished and powers of judgement dulled. Our identities are moulded by our dependence upon and subordination to the rational bureaucratic processes evidenced in the McDonald’s experience. Ritzer argues the process of McDonaldisation shows the ultimate irrationality of a system that does not meet human need but rather does more to damage it.
Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them (Ritzer 1993, p154).
In the USA this has had a damaging effect with an increase in diagnoses of Type 2 dia- betes. Critser (2004) argues that Type 2 diabetes has increased dramatically since the early 1990s, quoting figures from paediatric diabetes centres as showing Type 2 now making up 45 per cent of new diabetes cases, particularly in the poorer parts of the USA. These figures can be repeated for the UK where diabetes in general is on the increase.
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As in many countries worldwide, diabetes is increasing in England. Since 1991, the preva- lence of diagnosed diabetes has more than doubled in men and increased by 80 per cent in women. It is estimated there will be about 3 million people with diagnosed diabetes in the UK by the year 2010 (Department of Health, 2005a).
Critser lays the blame for this increase in diabetes mainly at the doors of fast food chains and government. As fast food has become cheaper, eating out no longer becomes a treat but more the norm. The servings of giant portions are replete with fat, sugar and salt, leading to a huge increase in calorie intake. The US government has not restricted the operations of the fast food companies, but at the same time has cut back on money avail- able to schools for PE and other organised exercise activities.
Comment
Applying these concepts across the general provision of social services you may be able to draw some interesting parallels with developments in social work. James (2004) argues that the processes below have become increasingly important in the organisation of local authority social service departments.
G Efficiency. The focus on Best Value requires local authorities to develop and improve services on a continuous basis, informed by the principles of efficiency, effectiveness and economy. However, this has led to an increased concern with efficiency which predomi- nates in the guidance literature on Best Value (Boyne, 2000).
G Calculability. The National Occupational Standards are used to assess the competence of social work students so that the actions of the students are broken down into discrete areas for assessment. Evidence-based practice is being introduced, which then assesses and calculates the effectiveness of practice based upon outcome rather than process. G Predictability. There is a drive for standardisation through, for example, National
Standards for Adoption and national assessment frameworks such as Quality Protects in children’s services.
G Control through the substitution of non-human for human technology. One-stop cen- tres have been developed on the internet where service users can tap into their local authority website to access different claim forms and information.
James (2004) suggests that the McDonaldisation of social work will lead to a lack of creativ- ity and innovation, as services and access to them become standardised. From an ethical standpoint, social workers who are required to follow sets of mechanistic procedures will find that their role in engaging in the moral and practical concerns of service users becomes neutered. If values are to remain central to social work practice then reducing social work
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When you are on placement, look at how the service in the agency in which you are placed reflects the concerns of:
G efficiency; G calculability; G predictability;
G control through the substitution of non-human for human technology.
to a set of discrete and unrelated actions becomes formulaic and therefore insensitive to the contexts and moral uncertainties of practice.
McDonaldisation represents a powerful critique of modern society. However, this anti- bureaucratic discourse has been contested by Du Gay (2000) who argues that bureaucracies can embody ethical practices. Du Gay suggests that bureaucracies have their own ethical practices, and should be judged by these standards and not by a generalised ethical per- spective which has little relevance to the accomplishments of bureaucracies. In a democratic society, bureaucracies should involve mediation and compromise between conflicting inter- ests. Thus the bureaucrat embodies or should embody ethically an impartial spirit which is crucial for running publicly funded state bureaucracies. For social workers, this means that they ethically embody this form of impartiality and should ensure that services that they are responsible for operate with equity. This requires making tough and difficult decisions between different groups with equal claims to resources. It also requires social workers to act with equity where some groups have been excluded from services, and requires them to work in a positive way to restore equity in an anti-discriminatory framework.
… while we may sometimes experience a sense of personal frustration in our dealings with state bureaux, we might learn to see such frustration as largely the inevitable by-product of the achievement of other objectives that we also value highly: such as the desire to ensure fairness, justice and equality in the treatment of citizens (Du Gay, 2000, p2). Bureaucracy is therefore an essential element in the organisation of large-scale public serv- ices such as those delivering social work services. What is more problematic is the use of management procedures which are seen as the solution to the current challenges facing social work. The claim that managerialism in social work leads to greater economy, effec- tiveness and efficiency has to be evaluated by research.
McDonald, et al. (2008) researched the effectiveness of social workers in applying relevant knowledge to practice and found it has become compromised. They interviewed 20 experi- enced fieldworkers, each of whom was asked to choose and describe a complex case from their recent practice which had caused them difficulty. They argue many practitioners dis- play stress when discussing their cases, often using the language of battle and conflict. They found barriers to the retention and use of professional knowledge at three levels: G A structural level, where a rigid hierarchical system did not encourage the use of practi-
tioner knowledge.
G A management level, where practitioners experienced supervision concentrating on workload management rather than professional issues.
G A practitioner level, where staff struggled with gaps in their knowledge and used defensive or procedural practice rather than working proactively and creatively. They conclude that instead of relying upon their knowledge, practitioners were fearful of blame for their actions and had become dependent on a raft of procedures and routines. In effect they conclude that staff have become institutionally captured by the dominant bureaucratic/rationing regime (adapted from Hudson, 2009).
R E S E A R C H S U M M A R Y
There is increasing unease that the information systems introduced into social work partic- ularly in the child care system may be counterproductive. The Social Work Task Force (Lamming, 2009) has already expressed some of this unease. Research carried out on behalf of the Economic Social Research Council now being disseminated in a number of journals highlight serious concerns with the new managerial systems in child care (see Peckover, et al., 2009, Peckover, et al., 2008, Broadhurst, et al., 2009). As White, et al., (2009) argues procedures for entering information into the Common Assessment Framework require social workers to spend more time not less recording their work with upwards of 80 per cent of social workers time spent in front of a computer screen enter- ing data rather than in face-to-face contact with families. This shifts the balance of power away from working with families, as White et al. (2009) argues the use of such managerial procedures produce ’objective assessments’ which provide flawed assessments of need and risk because they marginalise the service users own accounts of events.
Findings
Practitioners’ principal justifications for their actions originated from a conviction that finite resources had to be allocated equitably – eligibility criteria were seen as the means of ensuring objective assessments, and professional practitioners served as the neutral means of implementation. This attitude was found to be only slightly more apparent among those who had not obtained a full professional qualification.
Sullivan argues that this demonstrates how readily a new form of ‘practice wisdom’ can become established as part of the worker's repertoire of understandings. This is then intro- duced to users during initial short assessment visits and can effectively block the client from introducing his/her own views. In addition, Sullivan found that preferential treatment was accorded those older clients who showed gratitude (adapted from Hudson, 2009). The ubiquity of a managerial social work has the effect of transforming how social work- ers practice, think and feel about the work that they do. The research material presented above shows how these routinised systems can get ‘under the skin’ of social workers to such an extent that despite even long-held beliefs of self-determination and solidarity with service users it has the consequence of producing defensive and oppressive social work. In order to identify those procedures which enhance social justice social workers will need to be both individually reflexive in understanding their own practice but also work with col- leagues, service users and professional and trade union organisations to challenge the introduction of such managerial systems which are inimical to anti-oppressive practice.
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Sullivan (2009) collected data through semi-structured in-depth interviews with 40 field- work staff in two contrasting locations in England. Social workers ideological position was identified i.e. collectivist or committed to self-determination, to identify how these ideolo- gies justified and influenced their work with service users.
Accountability
For social workers it is important that their actions are open to public and professional scrutiny, and therefore they are required to keep scrupulous records to ensure that the information upon which accountability depends is made available and accessible to those who wish to ensure that social workers’ actions have been undertaken with fairness. Payne (2000) argues that a professional social worker working within a bureaucracy does have to be accountable, and as such has to explain their actions and justify them, usually on records and files kept by the organisation. This process requires that the worker has a duty to be accountable which can be expressed in a number of ways (see Figure 8.1):
G Report and explain – involves accounting for one’s actions by telling someone what has happened, for example in supervision or writing a report for a case conference. We must also not merely account for but also show why we acted in the way that we did, so explaining our actions.
G Judge and justify – social workers need to judge a situation and make a decision based upon the evidence they have gathered. This is mostly found in social work assessments. Once we have presented the evidence and made our decision, we need to be able to jus- tify that our decision was the right one.
G Accept blame or praise – as a consequence, social workers have a duty to accept blame if they have done something wrong which may lead to their dismissal. They also have a duty to accept praise which may lead to promotion if we choose it or extra pay.
The codes of practice for employers and social work and social care workers are central in developing accountability. As Clark (2006) argues, there has been a shift in the use of lan- guage and the responsibilities that this requires. The new standards contain duties to be fulfilled, but also qualities to be met in terms of trustworthiness and honesty, which extend into all aspects of their work and also how social workers behave in private. The codes of practice are important for social workers because this requires for the first time that employers have a duty to ensure that they support workers to do their jobs well. It is not enough to leave this to employers, as we saw in the previous chapter on advocacy. Workers have to engage with organisational issues to assess how far their organisation acts as an enabler or a barrier to effective social work and social care practice.