The problem of scarce resources, and an organisation that seems to a child protection worker to be driven by imperatives that conflict with his/her own professional ideals is not unusual. This chapter looks in more detail at aspects of the 'agency-professional arena' identified by Payne. Central to the discussion is the impact of the neo-liberal agenda, in the guise of ‘new managerialism’, that has had, and is having, a profound impact on the ways in which social services are delivered in many western capitalist countries. Despite one of the distinguishing features of social work being that it is almost exclusively carried out in an organisational context, Jones and May observe that in the professional social work literature, how to work in organisations tends to be treated as a secondary, marginalised sphere of knowledge and skills. Ethical conflict is inevitable in circumstances where social workers need to make decisions and exercise their professional judgement.