On the other hand, there are professional–client relationships which are imbued with moral purpose. The social worker–service user relationship is one in which the moral quali- ties of the persons involved have a significant effect on the quality of the work done. Professional relationships mix both the instrumental and the moral. Social workers may deal with fairly routine assessments for services, which require little beyond a technical competence in assessment and knowledge of the appropriate services. However, on other occasions he or she may engage with service users over fundamental moral choices relat- ing to a person’s autonomy and independence.
The moral elements of the working relationships in social work become more personalised, as Clark (2006) argues, when social workers work alongside service users in more informal ways. As residential social workers find out very swiftly, they are continually compelled to work out what is ‘normal’ or morally acceptable in respect of the behaviour that they come into contact with when caring for children and young people. In effect, they become surrogate parents who have to provide some moral guidance as to how those children should live their lives. These elements are rarely experienced by the managers and adminis- trators of social service departments, whose concerns take on a more utilitarian mode in deciding what is in the best interests of the many that they have responsibility for. What social workers are continually required to do then, is to reconcile the broader policy and guidance statements that form the boundaries of their work, with the particular problems which service users face which do not necessarily fit easily with these general policy state- ments. It requires social workers to judge the particular situation in the light of the general rules and find an acceptable way through for service users, reconciling their particular needs with the universal rules governing access to services. In reconciling these concerns, ethical codes of practice can provide guides to action, as can a recourse to policy and pro- cedures, but ultimately it requires the judgement of the social worker to assess their relative weight and significance and make a decision accordingly.
The recent critiques of bureaucracy have in part come from the New Right and their restruc- turing of the welfare state by the Conservative governments of the 1980s and early 1990s. The critique, aimed at state bureaucracies rather than the big and nonetheless bureaucratic capitalist multinational corporations, charged government bureaucracies with being ineffi- cient and inflexible with regard to the needs of modern citizens, who increasingly saw themselves as consumers of services rather than beneficiaries of what was argued were paternalistic state services. This analysis also maligned the professionals staffing these bureaucracies as essentially self-interested, with a vested interest in building unwieldy organisations to accrue greater power and personal gain (Marsland, 1996). This critique of bureaucracy was not limited to the political right, but the caricature which it portrayed was particularly effective in playing a part in the restructuring of welfare state services.
The old-style bureaucratic social services have not been replaced wholesale with suppos- edly more efficient privatised forms of service but with a hybrid. This hybrid – known as a quasi-market – has introduced market-like competition with a reduction in the provision of local authority social services, replaced in theory by private and voluntary providers com- peting for contracts to provide services, for example in domiciliary/residential care, family support and children’s residential care. Control over the organisation, management, assess- ment and commissioning of services remains with the local authority social services department. Enthusiasts for such an approach argue this has injected much dynamism and flexibility into social services. For critics such as Bauman (1994), it has brought the worst of both worlds – a bureaucratically managed service with the inequities of competition between providers, leading to a concern with cost efficiency rather than service effective- ness. For some writers, the pressure to develop standardised services within a managed market replicates some of the worst features of the mass consumer market (James, 2004). An example of such a merger of the rational bureaucratic organisation of services within a fiercely marketised and competitive industry is that of the fast food chain McDonald’s. This has led Ritzer (1993) to suggest that this form of organisation has far reaching conse- quences. Rationalisation reaches into all areas of everyday life. Ways of thinking are colonised by self-interested concern with efficiency and formal social control. The supreme manifestation of this is the bureaucracy, representing the process of rationalisation. This has a knock-on effect in which human interaction is controlled and then developed further into a rationalist framework.
Ritzer suggests that the fast food restaurant and the processes of rationalisation and bureaucratic control encapsulated within it, i.e. McDonaldisation, has become so powerful that its rationalising logic has permeated everyday interaction and individual identity.
McDonaldization is the process by which the principles of the fast food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world (Ritzer, 1993, p1).
Ritzer outlines five dominant themes within McDonaldisation: efficiency, calculability, pre- dictability, increased control, and the replacement of human by non-human technology.
Efficiency
Efficiency develops systems which produce the maximum output for the least cost. In McDonald’s this is sold to the consumer as being of benefit to them – fast food delivered quickly and cheaply. Much of the cost for this efficiency is placed onto the consumer, for example in queuing to order their food, placing their empty food cartons and trays into the waste bin.
Calculability
All actions in the restaurant are calculated and quantified so that the consumer is given the choice of an array of differently sized meals, the bigger the better. Thus quantity is valued over the quality of the product.
Predictability
Consumers of a ‘Big Mac Meal’ know exactly what to expect. A ‘Big Mac’ will be the same whether it is served in Wrexham or Reykjavik – it will be the same size, taste the same and be served in the same environment. Thus the ‘Golden Arches’ of the McDonald’s logo becomes the universal sign to attract you from a car driving on a motorway or strolling in a shopping mall. The experience of eating a meal is repeated endlessly across the globe or repetitively each time you buy a ‘Big Mac’.