ABSTRACT
The evaluation of social work has taxed the occupational imagination and the issue has fuelled criticisms of welfare claims to beneficial intervention. Social workers have their common-sense theories about their daily sociation. Uncertainties and anxieties are components of the social work experience. The social workers manage their own cases and have no formal routines for investigating the case practices of their team mates. Like organisational participants elsewhere the social workers create their own sense of career location and esteem within the daily collegial group. The formal requirements of the organisation are managed through tacit and unwritten understandings that are acquired by the competent member of the office setting. Large elements of the child care workers’ organisational lives are undefined by formal procedures or precise criteria. All the child care workers have to share in the experience of uncertainty about their intervention in the lives of children, parents and families.
