Workshop Welfare professionalism in an age of marketization and managerialization Reflections on discretion and accountability

The scholarly work of Michael Lipsky has had a great impact on the understanding of the social work profession. Lipsky has described case managers and other front-line workers as actors with considerable autonomy. Discretionary power is a necessary precondition for professional judgment and decision making. Seen from the perspective of public agents and managers of social service providers, however, it also creates crucial challenges of steering and controlling what is happening on the 'street-level' of policy making. With the upcoming of ideas of New Public Management, social service provision has experienced a profound marketization and managerialisation. The workshop critically discusses the impact of new models of welfare state governance on the discretionary powers of social workers. How do ways of 'people processing', organizational routines and habitual ways of handling cases change in the light of marketization and managerialization? In the literature we find very different positions: While some argue that the increased focus on efficiency forces social workers to develop from 'counselors' to 'cops with enforcement and sanctioning power', others found that practitioners try hard to continue to work in partnership settings - in order to defend their own discretionary power and professional values. The seminar introduces into the classical and most recent literature on social work, discretion, and welfare professionals. The literature and the teaching concept of the workshop are closely related to the course -Restructuring Welfare Governance - impacts on Welfare Professionalism and Street-level bureaucrats-. To assign for both courses is recommended, but not obligatory. The working language of the seminar is English and also most of the literature will be in English. Literature. Schram, S. (2012). Welfare professionals and street-level bureaucrats. In M. Gray, J. Midgley, & S. Webb (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of social work. (pp. 67-81). London, United Kingdom: SAGE Publications Ltd. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446247648.n5 FB 01 Humanwissenschaften Uni Kassel SoSe 2016 Soziale Arbeit FB 01 Humanwissenschaften Prof. Dr. Klenk Tanja