Social Work Assessment and Information Systems: A Critique of Managerialist Models and an Agenda for an Alternative Approach

Today’s public social service organizations are increasingly confronting two principal and potentially conflicting drivers of change: the need for the improvement of professionals’ autonomy and skills and simultaneously the need for tools which enable more comprehensive and faster managerial control of the results, efficiency and the quality of organizational processes. The present chapter deals with the issue of how to pursue the co-alignment between the above pressures. To this end, it focuses on three levels of analysis and intervention: the conception of assessment in public social services, the implementation of information systems for the planning and assessment of social services and the relationship between social workers’ organizational mandate and their professional and social mandates. At each level, the chapter argues against managerialism in the management of public organizations which is at the heart of the New Public Management approach, whose key precepts are still predominant and sets out an agenda for an alternative view that confers equal dignity to the three mandates of the social worker.