Professionalisation leads to increased rationalization?

 

Social work in Singapore is slowly undergoing a transformation. Where social services used to be dependent on the philosophy of the respective Voluntary Welfare Organisation or Family Service Centre, services are slowly being monitored and assessed by the governing bodies such as the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) and the National Council of Social Service (NCSS). Outcome measures and policy guidelines are slowly being developed to ensure that social service agencies are able to be consistent in their intervention and more importantly, provide a high standard of service delivery.

 

As we look into increasing the status of social work as a profession in Singapore, agencies and organizations are increasingly creating protocols and boundaries to define what the job scope of social workers would be.

 

Ironically, I wonder whether increased protocols and systems created by organizations and at a higher level, policies, would only serve to dehumanize the profession, where processes and intentions to serve people would be based on efficiency and calculation as opposed to motivations of morality, and emotion. This rationalization process identified by Weber, is ironic, as the systems we create to help and ensure our clients are supported, may dehumanize ourselves and cause us to become rigid and inflexible when working with our clients.

 

One possible side effect of our increased professionalization, may be increased bureaucracy, where clients seeking help are commodified and sorted into different problems where boundaries of help seeking are clearly defined, all in the name of social workers trying to specialize themselves, and set the limits of their practice. Could professionalization be an economic process, where by creating clear roles that can only be performed by social workers (ala doctors and lawyers), social workers are able to exert economic gain and earn a higher salary?

 

Now, the creation of new programmes also reflects similarities to economic models of operation, where organizations compete to tender for new agencies and programmes formulated by the government. As a result agencies clamber to expand and develop in order to provide new opportunities for staff advancement. Whether this philosophy of practice is negative is contentious, given that this process has led to more social workers entering the profession, a boon in an environment where manpower is truly lacking. Will the very institution that we are trying to serve be marginalized in due process? Only time will tell.

 

 

 

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