Social work managers are accountable for risks and safety in the psychosocial work environment. This article aims to understand how social work managers deal with safety in the psychosocial work environment in social service organizations with potentially conflicting logics of regulation and security, by answering the questions: How do social work managers conceptualize safety in the psychosocial work environment?; What are the implications of different conceptions of safety in the psychosocial work environment for social work management? Through a qualitative phenomenographic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 27 managers in the Swedish social services, three conceptions were found: an instrumental, interpersonal and holistic conception. As each conception encompasses the former and thus increases the level of comprehensiveness, tensions between the logics of regulation and security increases. Managers with a comprehensive conception must therefore reflect on the way regulations for safety may conflict with social relationships. Implications for social work management are the need to discuss how safety management relates to social work professionalism, and the self-regulation due to the integration of safety thinking in social work professionalization. Future research could investigate how the conceptions relate to managerial and professional practice and how different parts of the social services conceptualize safety. KEYWORDS social work management; safety management; psychosocial work environment; phenomenography
This article describes and analyzes how standardization is framed and adapted in relation to social work professionalism, by investigating how a regulation on quality management systems is implemented in a Swedish social service organization. A decoupling between department and unit frames enables the organization to fulfill objectives of organizational professionalism and external legitimacy while professionals can participate in the formulation of procedural standards relating to an occupational professionalism. Tensions are delegated to street-level. An implication is the possibility for managers and professionals to adapt standards to a professional practice, although this may undermine the uniformity of standards.
Today's ambition to adapt and individualize welfare delivery poses a challenge to human service organizations at the same time seeking to standardize clients, with consequences for street-level bureaucrats. In this article, the implementation of an instrument for standardized assessment of income support (IA) in Swedish social services is used to investigate what strategies street-level bureaucrats use to cope with tensions between standardization and individualization. Results from six focus groups in two organizations show how job coaches cope by individualizing their practice towards the client, while caseworkers equally often cope through standardization, which could work towards or against the client, in order to keep their discretion and handle organizational demands. Results point to a loose coupling between IA as an organizational tool for legitimacy, and as a pragmatically used questionnaire. Conflicts and contradictions are left to street-level bureaucrats to deal with.
Evaluation has different uses and impacts. This article aims to describe and analyse the constitutive effects – how evaluation forms and shapes different domains in an evaluation context – of evaluation related to an evidence-based policy and practice, by investigating how the evaluation of social investment fund initiatives in three Swedish municipalities is organized and implemented. Through interviews and evaluation reports, the findings show how this way of evaluating may contribute to constitutive effects by defining worldviews, content, timeframes and evaluation roles. The article discusses how social investment fund evaluation contributes to a linear knowledge transfer model, promotes a relation between costs and evidence and concentrates the power over evaluation at the top of organizations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.