Negotiating personal engagement and professional accountability: professional wisdom and ethics work

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between personal engagement and professional accountability in social work—considering whether the increasing focus on professional accountability in the context of the new public management, public austerity and market-based systems of welfare is incompatible with the personal engagement of social workers with service users and with their work. After undertaking a conceptual analysis of the terms, it is argued that both personal engagement and professional accountability are essential features of social work. Indeed, it is this negotiation of the creative tension between them that constitutes the subject matter and work of professional ethics. This requires a capacity and disposition for good judgement based in professional wisdom and a process of practical reasoning or ‘ethics work’ to find the right balance between closeness and distance, passion and rationality, empathic relationships and measurable social outcomes. It also requires a space for the exercise of professional wisdom.

Keywords:

• Personal Engagement
• Professional Accountability
• Professional Ethics
• Professional Wisdom
• Ethics Work

Notes

[1] Although Figure 1 is presented as a static conceptualisation, it should be regarded as a laying out of different elements, the position of which readers might contest, move around, debate and discuss. For example, one of the reviewers of the article suggested that being effective and efficient is a natural part of personal engagement; another that adequate personal engagement is necessary for professional accountability.