ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that as a relatively new model of service delivery, care management is an adaptation to conditions of late capitalism. As capitalism and McDonaldization have expanded globally, so care management has been adopted in a number of countries of Western neo-liberal democracies. Social workers working in state-run bureaucracies have been subject to the McDonaldization of social services through new public management (NPM) applied to public sector workers. The McDonaldization thesis therefore contributes to an understanding of the changing social services bureaucracies within which social workers function. Care management is a process involving assessment of individual service-user need, purchase of services to meet identified need and review of the delivery of those services. Care management is part of a trend toward individualism and the reduction of government commitment to public services, parallel trends in the delivery of social services developed during the Reagan/Thatcher era.
