Professional Discretion and Adult Social Work: Exploring Its Nature and Scope on the Front Line of Personalisation

Abstract

Drawing on studies spanning the restructuring of community care in the early 1990s, and subsequent addition of Direct Payments, through to the piloting of individual budgets and implementation of personalised support, this article seeks to tease out those lessons which may assist in understanding the exercise of front line discretion in adult social work within the new organisational environments created by personalisation. A typology of front line discretion is used to consider the interplay between formal and informal frameworks of practice. It is argued that the escalation of risk management technology attendant upon personalisation strengthens the routinisation of decision making at the expense of traditional bureaucratic and professional standards, whilst doing little to discourage those informal strategies which have long been used to control the contingencies of front line practice. Despite the promise of revalorising adult social work as a means of supporting people accessing social care to secure greater control over outcomes, it is concluded that there is little to discourage the perpetuation of conservative and defensive practice on the front line of personalisation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 43 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.