ABSTRACT
The years since the reorganization of personal social services have seen a progressive accretion of power to managers and away from practitioners in the large-scale welfare bureaucracies created by the Local Authority Social Services Act 1971. Yet the individual social worker retains a degree of personal decisionmaking responsibility substantially greater in terms of the consequences for the clients affected by his or her decisions than is true of most occupational groups. While changes in organizational structure have been a characteristic managerial response to problems, the responsibility carried by the individual worker has been little affected. What has changed is the worker’s awareness of personal vulnerability in the event of defective decision-making. The establishment of a framework for that decision-making is the subject of a tension between the organizational imperatives of the employing agency and the personal values of the social worker. The aim of this chapter is to identify the genesis of that tension, the values which govern social work practice, and the basis on which the differing perspectives are reconciled in the individual’s practice.
