Creating Happier Children and More Fulfilled Social Workers: Neoliberalism, Privatization and the Reframing of Leftist Critiques in Britain

Abstract

To differing degrees, governments in Europe, North America, and Australasia have, over recent years, given particular attention to the reform of services for children and families. However, the aim of this article is to focus on Britain and to examine plans to transform social-work services for children and young people who are “looked after,” that is to say, in public care. It is argued that these plans, focused on the introduction of what are termed social work practices, are best grounded and interpreted within an analytical framework that recognizes the centrality of neoliberalism. Furthermore, social workers and others working in related areas of human services provision should take account of how the plan to install social work practices is being discursively constructed and organized. Important here, it is maintained, is how this strategy seeks to deploy selectively leftist critiques of social work that have emerged over the past two decades.

KEYWORDS:

• children in public care
• neoliberalism
• privatization
• social work practices
• spirit of capitalism

Notes

1. This article is derived partially from a paper presented at the international conference Marginalized Youth, which took place at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, January 31 to February 2, 2008. It also draws on and radically reworks material featured in the author's book Transforming Children's Services? Social Work, Neoliberalism and the Modern World. (2009). Maidenhead, U.K.: McGraw Hill/Open University. Tony Blair was Labour Party Leader from 1994 to 2007 and Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007. In July 2007 he was succeeded as Labour Party Leader and Prime Minister by Gordon Brown.

2. Furthermore, the length of children's stays in the care system tends to vary: for example, “few children spend their whole childhood in care”; some 40% “stay for under 6 months and 13% stay for 5 years or more” (Secretary of State for Education and Skills, 2006: p. 16). Children in care are ethnically diverse, but black and mixed-race children are over-represented. For example, more than “half of children in care in London are from black or minority ethnic backgrounds” (Secretary of State for Education and Skills, 2006: p. 50). About “3,000 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are cared for by local authorities at any one time” (Secretary of State for Education and Skills, 2006: p. 16).

3. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is, of course, controversial federal legislation introduced to improve the performance of primary and secondary schools in the United States. The Every Child Matters program in Britain implicitly references U.S. approaches and reflects a keen attentiveness to language. There also appears to be similarity in terms of how contested policy is discursively embedded by means of terse, populist promotional slogans or sound bites (Garrett, 2007; see also Fairclough, 2000).

4. The envisaged model was initially referred to as social care practices. Subsequently, it was changed to social work practices (SWPs). This discussion, for ease of reference, refers to SWPs, the current name.

5. Neoconservatism is a related ism that has also generated global opposition. This is “entirely consistent with the neoliberal agenda of elite governance, mistrust of democracy, and the maintenance of market freedoms. But it veers away from the principles of pure neoliberalism and has reshaped neoliberal practices in two fundamental respects: first, in its concern for order as an answer to the chaos of individual interests, and second, in its concern for overweening morality as the necessary social glue to keep the body politic secure in the face of external and internal dangers” (Harvey, 2005, p. 82).

6. In this context, perhaps, Stuart Hall has been one of the most convincing and lucid commentators providing interpretations of the specific character of New Labour administrations. He has, for example, endeavored to identify what reform now amounts to within public services in Britain. For him, “marketisation and privatisation, whether frontally or incrementally introduced, is what reform now means. This type of modernisation is the New Labour trade-off for any kind of change” (Hall, 2003, p. 22).

7. The war of position is derived from the work of Antonio Gramsci. Writing during his period of confinement in prison, he argued that there was a need for Marxists to adopt tactical changes. This, for him, meant that had to be a shift from a “war of manoeuvre” to a “war of position.” That is to say, it was no longer appropriate to embark on a frontal assault against capital; instead, there was the need for a more subtle form of confrontation, one more conducive to the conditions in the West and one that focused on a longer war of colonization and territorial conquest. In the context of this discussion, therefore, it is suggested that the war of position may also be helpful in terms of understanding how the forces of neoliberalism are forging a Gramscianism of the Right and are intent on the slow colonization and marketization of key areas of public services (see also Forgacs, 1988).

8. This process is, in part, facilitated by a plethora of networks. Senior officers from local authorities are increasingly apt to be inside the same formal and informal networks as management consultants. Many senior officers are also apt to move from public services into private consultancy work. Perhaps the evolution of a central government/local authority/management consultancies complex is related to this fluidity.

9. Their work is based on a detailed study of the evolution of management literature circulating throughout the private sector in France, but their reading and interpretation of this literature has a more general European resonance. Significantly, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, p. 96) conclude, however, that the “mobilizing capacity contained in the new spirit of capitalism as deployed in 1990s management literature seems to us poor.” It might also be said that the arguments deployed in, for example, the literature associated with SWPs are also unconvincing.