De Professionalism And Austerity

Austerity’s impacts on the healthcare, social care and education professions are under the spotlight in this important book. From scarcer resources to greater stresses, and falling training budgets to rising risks, it charts how policies and cuts have compromised workers’ ability to undertake their professional roles. It combines research and practice experience to assess the extent of de-professionalisation in recent years, and how workers have responded. This book is a vital review of how austerity has resculpted our notions of professionalism.

Austerity’s impacts on the healthcare, social care and education professions are under the spotlight in this important book. From scarcer resources to greater stresses, and falling training budgets to rising risks, it charts how policies and cuts have compromised workers’ ability to undertake their professional roles. It combines research and practice experience to assess the extent of de-professionalisation in recent years, and how workers have responded. This book is a vital review of how austerity has resculpted our notions of professionalism.

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.

This timely book critically examines the European Social Model as a contested concept and concrete set of European welfare and governance arrangements. It offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of new economic models and existing European investment strategies to address key issues within post-Covid-19 Europe.

This book takes up the problems of social policy, state intervention and support in the hard times of austerity introduced by the Coalition government 2010-15, and continued under the Conservative government today. At a time when the economy is growing and pay levels finally rising, the necessity for more cuts in public expenditure is fiercely contested. The scope of state services, the levels of support for people in need, and the kinds of organizations that will deliver the services, will all be profoundly affected in coming years. The authors and editors assess some of these consequences visible now in the impact that expenditure cuts and reorganization have had on many areas of social policy, and explore the direction of change in the near future. Austerity Policies evaluates a wide range of changing form of state services and the transformations involving both the recipients and those delivering the services. It considers the past, present and future of austerity as a policy, and the problems affecting particular groups such as offenders, looked after children, and professionals such as social care workers and those engaged with domestic violence. The collection will be of interest to students and scholars of social policy, criminology, sociology, politics and media studies.

Transformative approaches to social work have been popular for some time. Most discussions of this perspective, however, focus on actual practice with clients or service users, not educational contexts. In addition, there is often a lack of clarity about what “transformative” really means, both in theory and in practice. This book brings together a range of contributors to reconsider transformative social work, focusing on concrete examples in academic settings both inside and outside the classroom. They illustrate theories and practices of transformative social work in the academy in detail from different standpoints. Chapters by scholars at all career stages, students, staff, and managers consider all aspects of academic work—teaching and learning, research, and administration—as well as labor that academics perform outside the university. Authors describe their understanding of a transformative perspective as well as the practices that flow from this conception, providing rich detail on how a transformative approach can be implemented. This book stands out for the breadth of its focus, its international contributions, and its openness about the new challenges involved in doing transformative work today. It develops an expansive and systematic understanding of what “transformative” can mean across the entire academic and professional context of social work education.

Enough of Experts: Expert Authority in Crisis analyses the challenges and threats to expert authority in neoliberal political economies and societies. It focuses upon the deep-seated political, economic, social and cultural transformations which have fundamentally destabilized and eroded the institutional foundations of expert authority over more than four decades. The book critically assesses the orthodox or ‘received’ model of expert authority as it has come under escalating pressures from a nexus of ideological, organizational, technological and cultural changes that have radically weakened the former’s core ‘institutional logic’ and practical efficacy. It also looks forward to a range of ‘expert futures’ in which expert groups and organizations decline in power and status as their prevalence proliferates to a stage where they become ubiquitous in neoliberal regimes. Finally, the book presents an alternative reflexive model of expert authority and governance that is grounded in the ‘dynamics of contestation and trust’ and stands in direct contrast to the orthodox, rational model.