Modernising Social Work and the Ethics of Care

• Main Author: Gabrielle Meagher
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Social Work & Society 2004-01-01
• Series: Social Work and Society
• Online Access: https://ejournals.bib.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/sws/article/view/237

Recent attempts to 'modernise' social work have emphasised the importance of collaboration, partnership, and participation with individual users of services and the wider community. However, technical-rational aspects of managerialism have proved dominant. Managerialist approaches to social service administration and delivery threaten important dimensions of social work; specifically its caring and democratic-transformative dimensions. However, social work theorists have only recently begun to re-engage with ideas of care. We argue that closer attention to feminist debates about the ethics of care can make a significant contribution to not only rehabilitating the ideal of care for social work but also to moving forward the modernisation agenda itself. We develop a feminist critique of managerialism, and argue that the discourse of the ethics of care offers useful ways of framing arguments to counter some damaging impacts of managerial reforms.