Introduction

This chapter focuses on organisational issues affecting the delivery of social care and the prospects for advancing person-centred support. A significant contradiction in social care is that while over the years much of the focus of reform has been on organisational change and restructuring, organisational issues are still highlighted by both service users and service workers as key barriers in the way of person-centred support. People from a very wide range of organisations and projects have contributed their views and experience to this book. These include statutory, voluntary and private sector organisations, operating in the health, housing and social care fields. They have very different histories, cultures and philosophies. They provide a wide variety of services and range in size from small to very large. This means that it is difficult to generalise about them. They have different aims, philosophies and systems of accountability. Yet all seem to have been affected by the same major development in public policy, which in turn has had major negative effects, from what people have told us, on the activities of both service workers and service users.

This development has been the move to managerialist/consumerist approaches in public policy and services, including specifically social care, where such ideas were pioneered in the early 1990s, with the community care reforms. Managerialism has been defined as: ‘the introduction of business-oriented principles and personnel into the running of the public services (Miller, 1999, p 33).