Introduction

There has been an historic reticence and ambivalence within social work about claiming professional status, elitism, and indeed, knowledge and evidence-informed practice. This has been exploited by public policy makers and managers who have feared first, social work's social justice heritage, second, who seek the efficient administration of rationed social welfare, and third, who look to social work to undertake a degree of social control. Social work is capable of living with and mediating these ambiguities, but the analysis of how social work is led and managed demonstrates that this is not evident in the current structural or organisational landscape. In this chapter the impact of social work being constrained as a ‘state-mediated’ profession (Johnson, 1972), with restricted discretionary space (Briskman, 2013), is explored. It has not proved possible to collectively resist the imposition of managerialism and the limitations of the performance indicator culture. Enterprise and change are not driven from within social work itself, but arise from government ministers’ initiatives on issues such as adoption (Narey, 2011), social work education (Croisdale-Appleby, 2014; Narey, 2014) and service failure (Social Work Task Force, 2009; Munro, 2010, 2011; Social Work Reform Board, 2012).

There is a strong argument to be made and won – to seek, engage and promote the personal, professional experience of social workers. This is distinct from the views, aspirations and prejudices of managers, organisational interests and policy makers. This chapter explores the diversion of social workers who become managers to a focus on managerialism, externalised defined targets and measures as opposed to their own responsibilities to develop their own practice knowledge, practice wisdom and evidence-informed case and service decision making.

The current location of cohesive leadership for social work across institutions or specific roles is not clear. The roles recently created in England of Chief Social Worker for Adults in the Department of Health and Chief Social Worker for Children and Families in the Department of Education are embedded in the civil service. This is an important potential focus for government policy. The role of principal social worker created in most local authority children's and adult services, and in a growing number of other organisations has taken a wide variety of forms and sets of responsibilities.