The Organisation of Professional Work in the Social Services

Abstract

In recent years a good deal has been written on the subject of organisation in the personal social services, much of it responding to the recommendations of the Seebohm Committee Report and the subsequent reorganisation of the service in accordance with the terms of the Local Authorities Social Services Act of 1970. Much of what has been written has tended to accept the ‘inevitability’ of bureaucratic orgainsation for the service, and to consider the extent to which organisation on these principles will either produce conflict with professional principles or prove acceptable to a profession (of social work) which may have founded itself on a consonant ‘rationality’. Writers like Rowbottom¹ and Kogan and Terry² conclude that the tensions likely to arise are so marginal or peripheral that they can be reduced easily enough by attention to management or organisational style, devoted to the creation of maximum devolution and maximum flexibility in the definition of work roles. Implicitly, therefore, the bureaucratic organisation and the professional organisation coincide at the point where bureaucracy is at its most flexible, and professional organisation (perhaps) at its most structured.