Austerity was presented as the antidote to sluggish economies, but it has had far-reaching effects on jobs and employment conditions.
With an international team of editors and authors from Europe, ...North America and Australia, this illuminating collection goes beyond a sole focus on public sector work and uniquely covers the impact of austerity on work across the private, public and voluntary spheres.
Drawing on a range of perspectives, the book engages with the major debates surrounding austerity and neoliberalism, providing grounded analysis of the everyday experience of work and employment.
Abstract
In the current dual context of Black Lives Matter/defund the police and calls for accountability to those whom social work has harmed as part of the state machinery, this article returns to ...the debate on state theory. The article explores three state-linked forms of care, coercion and control: stealth coercion/control (in aged-care); population-linked coercion/control, and police and carceral-linked coercion/control. The article analyses what is missing in state theory in a neoliberal world and argues that social work needs models of practice and theory that are themselves a form of resistance and relative autonomy from the state in that they challenge the oppressive state machinery while making demands on the state for equity and fairness. This model permits social work to be humble in the face of lived experience and grounded in the priorities of the community, rather than uncritically legitimising state-linked oppression and securing the ground for profit and accumulation. The article concludes that while this social justice-engaged model will be essential for those moving into the new practice contexts resulting from defunding the police, it is also a model that will serve to strengthen the relevance and integrity of all social work practice.
This article returns to the debate on state theory in the context of Black Lives Matter/defund the police and calls for accountability to those whom social work has harmed. The article explores three state-linked practices: stealth coercion/control (in aged-care); population-linked coercion/control, and police and carceral-linked coercion/control. The article then analyses what is missing in state theory in a neoliberal world and argues that social work needs models of practice and theory that are themselves a form of resistance in order to enable social workers to make demands on the state for equity and fairness. The article also discusses practices associated with this model including being humble in the face of lived experience and grounded in the priorities of the community. The implications for service users include the opportunity to participate in the organisation and delivery of services, greater options for dignity-enhancing, equitable services and a reinforced sense of themselves as rights-bearing citizens with entitlement to services and integral to social service delivery. This social justice-engaged model will be essential for those moving into the new practice contexts resulting from defunding the police, and it is also a model that will serve to strengthen the relevance and integrity all social work practice.
During the era of neoliberalism, the nonprofit services sector has simultaneously been a site of (a) promarket restructuring and collective and individual resistance and (b) alternative forms of ...service delivery. Drawing on data collected as part of an ethnographic study in the Canadian nonprofit social services sector, this article explores the impacts of some of restructuring on professional, quasi-professional, and managerial employees in eight unionized, nonprofit social services. The data show that the adoption of social unionism has permitted some nonprofit social service workers to initiate new processes through which to have a voice in far-reaching social issues, sometimes in coalition with management and/or clients. The findings of this study point to the irrepressibility of the participatory spirit and its capacity to seek new forms and practices despite the stretched and restructured conditions of today’s nonprofit social services sector.
Theorises consent and dissent in social work practice and workplaces. Analyses strategies that some critical social workers use to withdraw consent to working within the neoliberal state form, and ...instead build new emancipatory knowledges, theory, practice and emergent dissenting hegemonies. Analyses three themes, namely, dissent as : 1) working on the edges of the state; 2) working on decolonisation including what it means to be a settler; and 3) critical reflection. Discusses these themes together under a final interwoven theme that is argued to reflect new hegemonies, in particular political world-making, building new emancipatory knowledges, theory, practice and hegemonies. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
INTRODUCTION: This article builds on Fraser's (2021, 2019) argument that the overlapping crises of social reproduction, climate, economy, and public health have resulted in a splintering of the ...hegemony of dominant groups. This generates a "wilding of the public sphere" in which groups urgently seek counter-hegemonic storylines and alternative solutions to interwoven crises (Fraser, 2021, n.p.). This article further theorises consent and dissent in social work practice and workplaces.
METHODS: Data were collected using qualitative interviews and a convenience sample of ten executive directors and managers of social services in a large city in Canada. Data were analysed using a constant comparison method involving multiple readings of the field notes and transcripts, until patterns and themes could be discerned.
FINDINGS: The article analyses three themes, namely, dissent as: 1) working on the edges of the state; 2) working on decolonisation including what it means to be a settler; and 3) critical reflection. The themes are then discussed together under a final interwoven theme that is argued to reflect new hegemonies, in particular political world-making, building new emancipatory knowledges, theory, practice and hegemonies.
CONCLUSION: Social-justice-engaged practices can emerge within systems hostile to social solidarity, suggesting that dissent is resilient to neoliberalism though it may sometimes operate quietly and at the level of individual practice. This resistance and the nascent, shared, dissenting narratives can contribute to the de-legitimatisation of oppressive social structures as social workers search for, and build, more emancipatory approaches.
This article explores the operation of gender and industrial relations in long‐term care work or nursing home work, ‘from within’ the experience of the predominantly female workforce in seven ...unionized facilities in Canada. Drawing on qualitative case study data in non‐profit facilities, the article argues that the main industrial relations challenges facing long‐term care workers are that their workplace priorities do not fit within existing, gendered, industrial relations processes and institutions. This article starts from the experience of women and threads this experience through other layers of social organization such as: global and local policy directions including austerity, New Public Management, and social and healthcare funding; industrial relations mechanisms and policy; and workers’ formal union and informal efforts to represent their interests in the workplace. The strongest themes in the reported experience of the women include: manufacturing conditions for unpaid work; increasing management and state dependence on unpaid care work; fostering loose boundaries; and limiting respect and autonomy as aspects of care work. The article extends the feminist political economy by analysing the links between the policies noted above and frontline care work. Building on gendered organizational theory the article also introduces the concept of non‐job work and suggests a fourth industrial relations institution, namely the needs and gendered expectations of residents, families and workers themselves, operating within the liminal spaces in care work.
Have more than 15 years of neoliberal restructuring eliminated much of the practice wisdom and social justice value orientation that strongly influenced social work practice in previous decades? In a ...recent, multi-year, three-province study of social service restructuring in Canada, frontline practitioners were asked about their experience in the context of constraints such as cuts to funding, new philosophies of service and forms of work organisation. They were also asked what they would like to alter about the social services system if they had the power to enact one change. Their answers illuminate the dilemmas in which social services currently operate in many parts of the industrialised, English-speaking world, as well as highlight the indomitability of worker resistance and the social justice ethic that underlies many contemporary approaches to social work practice.
Abstract
Exploring long-term residential care (Ontario, Canada), we argue that within the context of late neoliberalism, care time is political, contested, and multi-scalar. Multi-scalar time ...captures the way that time commodifies, disciplines, and delimits workers’ experience of care, and fractures human relations and solidarities. Drawing on data from nonprofit nursing homes in Canada, the article explores how the larger policy context of care work shapes and hinders workers’ abilities to spend time caring and building relationships with residents, how workers negotiate care provision in austere environments, and how workers use borrowed time to de-commodify care and find spaces for solidarity.
Participation in the predominantly female voluntary social services is the norm that most workers expect, but little is known about how participation plays out in the circumscribed realities of ...managerialism and outsourcing. This paper asserts that there are three kinds of overlapping participative processes in the voluntary social services: (1) procedural-formal; (2) practice-professional; and (3) affinity processes, and that these are closely associated with the gendered notions of caring and care’s connection to social mission and values. Our data suggest that rather than expanding in the context of third way politics, opportunities for all three kinds of participation have been severely curtailed by managerialism. This paper presents arguments drawn from two case studies of conditions in voluntary agencies (in Scotland and Australia) where caring was found to be a form of workplace participation, as well as the basis for exploitation and abuse of the workers by employers and clients.
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