Why good social workers do bad things: An institutional ethnography of social work with children and families.

This thesis explores how the activities of social workers in a children and families department of a UK local authority are organised, to understand the contradictions and tensions in the social work role, specifically in relation to the work undertaken that results in care proceedings.

Taking an institutional ethnographic frame, the study adopted the standpoint of social workers, illuminating through observation and conversation the actualities of their day-to-day activities. This framework enabled the study to explicate the vast web of ruling relations that organised and coordinated their activities across various locations and points in time, and to situate the findings in relation to the underlying ideologies shaping the construction of “normal” childhood and “good” parenting.

The research findings identified a bifurcation of consciousness, a dissonance between social work as it was imagined and social work as it was performed. In communicating an understanding of their everyday activities social workers drew on authoritative accounts, framed by theorised concepts of social work as it appears in literature. However, the study found that the activities undertaken by social workers in their day-to-day role bore little resemblance to the theorised notions of social work they had communicated. Social workers’ daily activities were organised as a series of disconnected tasks designed to serve the organisation’s need to demonstrate compliance with targets. The study identified that the opportunities in which social workers have to exercise professional discretion are reducing as a result of the near-constant surveillance of their activities along with a range of mechanisms of control and compliance deployed by the local authority to restrict professional judgement.

This study shows that an exploration of social work activities through an institutional ethnography can highlight the systemic and multifaceted ways in which good social workers are compelled to do bad things.