Centre for Social Work Research (CSWR)

The nature and development of the modern welfare state

This strand of the centre’s work is devoted to researching and understanding the changing character of the public service and welfare state project in Britain. Social work, health care, education – indeed the whole panoply of traditional ‘welfare’ professions and their associated institutions - are now the subject of a process of continual and radical social transformation. This process has important effects upon professional identity, on the nature of the implicit and explicit ‘contract’ between services, professionals, and service users, and therefore upon the project of training, managing, and leading welfare services and professionals. However these, processes are poorly researched, conceptualised and understood. The talk is of stress, change fatigue, inspection and audit fatigue, loss of secure identity, the threats arising from ‘integration’ – all of which accurately reflect dimensions of professional and service user experience but with little understanding of the political and socio-economic context for these transformations of experience.

To date the research programme has largely drawn upon particular dimensions of projects in related fields – and is thus a programme consisting of well developed questions, hypotheses, and insights in need of empirical testing in order to yield more refined and grounded theories. Some of the central planks of this project are:

The nature of ‘governance’ and its impact upon contemporary welfare identities, and user experiences

The emergence of ‘governance’ as a set of mediating practices and institutions that link the state, the market and the life world (civil society) are of particular relevance to the understanding of contemporary social work, which has always been situated at the boundary between public and private life, and between the family, the child and the state. Governance both signals, and constitutes, a new and emergent ‘social contract’ that social professionals are central in enacting.

All professionals, service users, and citizens are aware of this new ‘contract’ but are poorly equipped to understand, critique, resist, evaluate or interrogate it. The CSWR will be undertaking empirical research that illuminates this experience, and gives grounded conceptual form to its nature. Many of the ideas that will inform this work are contained in Cooper A. & Lousada J. (2005) Borderline Welfare. London: Karnac Books. The interplay of social, emotional , and professional experience in this domain was explored in a major residential conference – Governed States of Mind: thinking psychoanalytically about governance, organised by UEL, The Tavistock Clinic and the Open University in March 2006. The themes have also been the subject of some of the seminars in the Tavistock Policy Seminars series, which researchers from CSWR are involved in organising. In addition the CSWR’s work with organisations such as the IDeA (Improvement and development Agency for local government) to develop more responsive systems of audit and inspection in the public sphere provides evidence of the still emerging nature of the ‘new public sector’.

For further information on this work, contact Prof. Andrew Cooper or Dr. Liz Webb.

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© 2009