ABSTRACT
In 1975, I sat with my social worker colleagues in our regular team meeting as the Team Leader summarised the contents of a memorandum from the Director of Social Services. It announced that team leaders were to become ‘District Managers’, with increased responsibilities for a wider range of services and with more managerial authority. Team members exchanged puzzled and quizzical glances. Most of us were amused by this strange term, which didn’t seem to fit with the social work ethos in which we worked. There were suppressed giggles around the room. I said that I had come across this job title before, when I was still at school and was working for a men’s tailoring chain on Saturdays. We had a district manager then, I recalled, who used to visit us once a month to check whether our profit levels were higher than in the comparable month of the previous year. I predicted confidently that a job title used in the commercial world of men’s tailoring would never catch on in social work. There were approving nods and grunts of assent all round. We moved on dismissively to the next item on the agenda. (Five years later, I was a district manager.)
This brief reminiscence is the historical starting point for the book. It was my first encounter with the suggestion that social work had things to learn from the business world. Up to that point, during my time as a social work student and throughout my work following qualification, a clear distinction was drawn between social work as a non-commercial activity in the public and voluntary sectors and private commercial activities, driven by the market’s profit motive. As time has gone by, this distinction has been eroded to such an extent that what we now have in existence is, I would argue, ‘the social work business’. This business has distinctive aspects, just as other businesses do: for example, the business of supermarkets is obviously different
from the business of car production. However, the central argument of the book is that so much of social work’s ideology and management is derived from an overarching business discourse, shared by businesses of vastly different hues, that ‘the social work business’ is now an appropriate designation. (One of the private sector’s social care trade papers is called, without a trace of irony, The Caring Business.) Thinking along these lines prompts other, more contemporary, reminiscences.
