ABSTRACT
The plea for user involvement has been a feature of good social work practice at least since the writers of the Seebohm Report pointed towards the restructuring of social work services which took place in 1970. The ‘terms of engagement’ altered over the following quarter-century, and the shifting realities of service users’ and carers’ experiences of social work are produced in the meeting of policy, guidance, rhetoric and statute from the state, and action, lobbying, and rhetoric, from citizen advocacy groups and user movements. This chapter opens with a brief sketch of the policy and service contexts within which debate about the potential for service users as participating and empowered citizens has been played out. These contexts sensitise us to the point and counterpoint of the various rhetorics of participation and quality. We outline the main motifs in the Conservative government’s case for participation, and explore the reinforcing impact of the performance culture and management-by-effectiveness strategies, before turning to alternative rhetorics of participation and quality. There are various reasons for concluding that the advocacy of service user participation will always prove problematic when worked out in a context of state purchased services. But the thrust of this book is against a pessimistic resort to an outsider stance and for the advocacy of service users as critical outsiders-on-the-inside. This stance is an uncomfortable one, but one which enables participation through consumerist strategies, individual planning, service policy development, self-empowering and self-help groups, and advocacy evaluation.
