Navigating infrastructural mazes

Abstract

Social work is characterised by uncertainty and ambiguity, social workers are mandated to intervene in the lives of families, requiring them to make morally charged, complex decisions with and for families. The field is beset by high workloads, time pressure, negative media attention, and cost-containment measures. In recent years, acknowledgement of the complexities of social work and the challenges faced by professionals has grown, prompting attempts to reorganise the field through frequent reforms, and to reduce uncertainty of practice through standards and accountability measures. Concurrently, there is a greater recognition of the importance of professional judgement, and the need for reflexive practice that engages different knowledges, to allow for more tailored care. The Dutch social care system is currently facing a crisis, and the government has implemented temporary programs to redesign standards and practices. These experimental spaces are the main research site of this thesis, which aims to explore how Dutch social care actors navigate the friction between reforms, standards, accountability, and professional autonomy in highly charged moral settings in social care. This thesis aims to explore how Dutch social care actors navigate the friction between reforms, standards, accountability, and professional autonomy in highly charged moral settings in social care. The research for this thesis was conducted in three studies in the Netherlands: a study on the use of intuition by youth care professionals and two action research studies focused on reform, discretionary space and accountability in social care and child protection. Ultimately, I argue that we need to treat the system similarly to families in need: when professionals look at families, they are expected to look at them as a complex network with a history, with values, different roles and complexities. Families are not expected to get it right immediately, but can work in incremental changes together with those in their network and care providers. However, when there is a crisis or the need for sudden, larger changes, there is space and authority to make these decisions. There is a collective responsibility, reflection and shared decision-making towards the shared aims. This means that the social care system requires engagement in continuous incremental, collective, reparative work that explores alternative notions of success and failure, and in line with that to reconsider underlying values and notions of accountability and governance, to build a system that fosters a space in which vulnerable families, professionals, managers and administrators can be supported.