Social Workers in a Modernising Welfare State: Professionals or Street-Level Bureaucrats?

Abstract

Social workers are often depicted as street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) or professionals interchangeably. However, to find out how social workers relate to new policy measures, a clear distinction between SLBs and professionals is helpful. Ideal–typical SLBs subscribe to new policies although they may diverge from them in practice, to accommodate clients. Ideal–typical professionals weigh new policies against their ethical code. If the new policy goes against their professional principles, they protest on behalf of their clients. In this article, we study Dutch social workers who have to implement a new policy that (i) obliges their clients to actively participate in society and (ii) obliges them to rely on family and friends when they need help. The data for this article are derived from two projects: interviews with twenty-nine experienced social workers and interviews with social workers in neighbourhood teams and observations of their interactions with clients in six municipalities. We found that Dutch social workers think as professionals: they weigh the new policy against their ethical code and have serious doubts about the second part of the new policy. Hence, they find ways to avoid implementation. However, they behave as SLBs, bending the rules in practice. They rarely confront policymakers or higher management.

Social workers as street‐level policy entrepreneurs

“…As is the case for other SLBs, the policy role (if at all) of street‐level social workers has usually been seen as narrowly emphasizing individual efforts to influence the form that the implementation of policies takes. These efforts are not generally perceived as seeking to bring about formal change in policy designs or to initiate new policies but rather to thwart, what they perceive as, the unjust aspects of existing policies (Hoybye‐Mortensen, 2015; Ostberg, 2014; Trappenburg et al, 2019). With this, the role of street‐level managers, among them social work managers, in articulating lacunae in existing policies has recently been identified (Gassner & Gofen, 2018).…”

Beyond the Front-Line: the Coping Strategies and Discretion of Lithuanian Street-Level Bureaucracy During COVID-19

“…Consequently, street-level servants face dilemmas on a daily basis -involving a lack of resources and increasing demand for services. The emergence of such a dilemma has been underlined by many theorists who seek to develop the theory of street-level bureaucracy (Brodkin 2020;Maynard-Moody-Musheno 2003), and the phenomenon has been confirmed and revealed in detail by numerous empirical studies (Small 2006;Spitzmueller 2014;Trappenburg et al 2020).…”

Constructing questions for the social professions of today: the case of social pedagogy

“…All of the above-mentioned effects have led to a proliferation of administrative regulations that have only increased bureaucracy for social professionals (Lorenz, 2017), but without this resulting in a perceptible improvement in either their training or the results of their actions on the participating people and communities. In fact, it has been pointed out that neoliberal approaches have exacerbated social inequality (Hartman, 2005;Trappenburg, Kampen and Tonkens, 2019).…”

“…How should we respond to this: implement said policy or, opposing it, follow what the professional code of ethics dictates? (Trappenburg et al, 2019). What, or whom, 'to betray'?…”