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The Dissertation Will Be Based On A Literary Review. The Areas That Will ...


Title: The dissertation will be based on a literary review. The areas that will be covered are the impact of the marketisation of adult social work, competence based learning and assessment, and the impact of managerialism all of which have contributed to the dramatic change in the professional role.
The introduction of market values and mechanisms into social work, which began in the early 1980s and has been supported by successive UK governments, has created a profession which today bears almost no resemblance to the profession as it had existed prior to these changes. Today, social workers are more likely to specialise than they had been in the past (ie the role of the generic social worker has almost completely disappeared), much of their work is imposed by statute and they are now much more likely to be affected by budgets and targets than had been the case previously.
Harris sets the establishment of what he calls the social work business (Harris, 2003 p.1) firmly against the global socio-economic pressures on nation states beginning in the early 1980s to, position social welfare in relation to the global economy (Harris, 2003 p.32). Harris argues that, against the backcloth of this wider context, the social services sphere of community care was used as the primary vehicle for the establishment of the social work business through two inter-related developments: marketisation and managerialism (Harris, 2003 p.32).
The core philosophy on which the marketisation of social work is based is the idea that market mechanisms when compared to traditional, centrally-managed public sector services are much more efficient, effective and economic in allocating resources (Harris, 2003 p.43) and that therefore by imposing those market mechanisms on the public sector through, for instance, the introduction of quasi-markets (Le Grand and Bartlett, 1993 cited in Gould & Baldwin, 2004 p.48), those public sector services would be transformed into services which allocate resources much more effectively themselves thus leading to efficiency improvements and cost savings.
The quasi-markets imposed on public sector service providers should not be equated to pure commercial markets. The major differences are that on the supply side while, there is competition between service suppliers; in contrast with pure markets, suppliers are not necessarily privately owned, nor are they necessarily required to make profits. On the demand side, consumer purchasing power resides not in cash but in a budget confined to the purchase of a specific service, and the service user does not exercise the final choice concerning purchasing decisions; these are delegated to the social worker/care manager (Le Grand 1990 cited in Harris, 2003 p.43).
While the quasi-market concept as used for social work purposes is predominantly an artificial construct, it remains a key concept in attempts to instil marketisation in the social work sphere.

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