ABSTRACT
Within liberal representative democratic governance regimes (Pierson 1998), mechanisms and arrangements have developed for managing the sphere of ‘the social’ (Donzelot 1988; Parton 1996a; Rose 1996). These include the range of institutions that came to be known collectively as ‘the welfare state’. In Chapter 1 it was noted that, as part of its management of ‘the social’, the welfare state provides the legal authority for social work and the material conditions for its practice: social work is the operational embodiment of the welfare state’s intervention in individual citizens’ lives (Harris, J. 1999; White and Harris 1999). Against that backcloth, this chapter explores the characteristics of social work within the British welfare state in the pre-business era. It outlines the shoring up of social work’s position following the implementation of the Seebohm Report (Cmnd. 3703 1968). The resultant levels in social work’s regime in this period are then set out as a precursor to highlighting the existence of a parochial professional culture in social work, within which social workers enjoyed a substantial degree of autonomy and discretion as ‘bureauprofessionals’.
