‘If You Could Change One Thing’: Social Service Workers and Restructuring

Abstract

Have more than 15 years of neoliberal restructuring eliminated much of the practice wisdom and social justice value orientation that strongly influenced social work practice in previous decades? In a recent, multi-year, three-province study of social service restructuring in Canada, frontline practitioners were asked about their experience in the context of constraints such as cuts to funding, new philosophies of service and forms of work organisation. They were also asked what they would like to alter about the social services system if they had the power to enact one change. Their answers illuminate the dilemmas in which social services currently operate in many parts of the industrialised, English-speaking world, as well as highlight the indomitability of worker resistance and the social justice ethic that underlies many contemporary approaches to social work practice.

Keywords:

• Restructuring
• Practice Knowledge
• Macro Constraint

Funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Fund (Canada) is gratefully acknowledged, as are the contributions of the research coordinators, Candace Bernard, Linda Kreitzer and Shannon Steele, the 25 research assistants and the 86 research participants. The author also thanks the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal for their helpful insights and comments.

Notes

1. The term ‘globalisation’ is used widely in social work discourse to signify a number of processes. In the present paper, globalisation signifies a set of processes and ideologies currently associated with neoliberalism. However, globalisation has also become an ideology in its own right in that it naturalises the inevitability and domination of neoliberalism, markets and private market solutions for all regions, localities and types of human problems.

2. As Diane Sainsbury (2001) notes, the terms ‘restructuring’, ‘recasting’, ‘retrenchment’ and ‘modernisation’ have been used interchangeably in the literature, resulting in a lack of clarity. In the present paper, the term ‘restructuring’ is used to indicate sweeping changes and programme redesign (Sainsbury, 2001, p. 260) and ‘downsizing’ is used to indicate a reduction of funds precipitating an overall reduction in the organisation, workforce and services provided.

3. Three aboriginal workers could not be located and rather than reduce input from this key constituency, three aboriginal workers doing similar types of jobs were substituted.

4. Downtown east-side Vancouver has experienced numerous problems associated with long-term poverty and structural injustices. Among other challenges, it has the highest rate of heroin use in Canada and a large population of homeless, hard-to-house and semi-housed citizens.