ABSTRACT
The ages of the practitioners and their length of service are typical of the occupation as a whole. The image of the social services department represented is some distance from traditional occupational homilies upon professions as groups bounded by shared values and objectives. A great deal of social policy and occupational literature looks to the legislative, organisational and philosophical underpinnings of welfare services. Workers’ accounts of managerial dereliction have been cast by some occupational observers as unconscious displacement of the inherent anxieties of the job or evidence of practitioner immaturity. The social worker is at the periphery of her organisation and interacts with numerous occupational groups that make up the apparatus of state and voluntary welfare. In brief, their occupational world compared with that of ten years ago had become more tightly bounded by four particular events: specialisation, decentralisation, the pressing demands of child protection practice and local government reorganisation.
