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Neil Thompson looks at research into the state of morale among social workers in the statutory sector during the era of New Labour.

In this important paper, Professor Chris Jones discusses the findings of his research project in which he interviewed more than 40 experienced local authority social workers in the north of England. His findings make for depressing reading.

The following two comments capture the point he makes: "I was not expecting to find a happy story, but I was not prepared for the extent of stress and unhappiness that I came across", and "all is not well in state social work. The signs of stress are everywhere."

Jones recounts stories of excessive workloads, unsupportive management and a lack of appreciation for the efforts and skills that go into social work practice.

Sadly, my own work as a trainer and consultant reinforces this rather worrying picture. While I often come across examples of excellent practice by social workers and their supervisors and managers, I also encounter many examples of overstretched staff whose morale is in tatters and whose physical and mental well-being could be at risk.

Given the emphasis on socio-political factors in the researcher's earlier published work,¹ it is unsurprising, but none the less pleasing, to note that he relates the picture of a demoralised workforce to the broader context of political ideology and policy-making.

In particular, he writes of the significance of what he calls the "neo-liberal project", with its emphasis on individualism - a feature of earlier Conservative administrations that has continued into the New Labour era.

Stress has long been seen in mainly individualised, psychological terms without adequate attention being paid to the broader organisational and social context. In this respect, this research adds weight to the critique of traditional models of stress by highlighting the political factors that are contributing to the pressure cooker of local authority social work.

A significant part of the neo-liberal project is a move away from a model of the state as a provider of welfare services, towards that of a regulator of such services. This can be seen to have the effect of placing less emphasis on the human qualities and interpersonal skills upon which effective social work is traditionally premised, and more on the "processing" of cases in a far more mechanistic way.

But it is not simply a matter of changes at the socio-political level affecting the experiences and circumstances of individual practitioners. Jones also acknowledges the significance of the organisational context. He says: "What became clear in the course of the research was that the most negative stress came directly from the agency and not the clients. Clients were a cause of considerable anxiety, but it was a different form of stress to that caused by agency and government policy."

Here we are seeing something not entirely new, as previous research has also shown that the organisational context and culture can be major contributors to stress and are far more significant than client-related pressures.^2,3

This is an important paper that adds weight to both the growing call for stress to be taken seriously and the need to understand social work in its broader socio-political context.

- The paper, Voices From the Front Line: State Social Workers and New Labour, by Chris Jones, appears in the British Journal of Social Work, Volume 31, Issue 4, published in August 2001.

www.bjsw.oupjournals.org

Neil Thompson is author of Stress Matters (Pepar, 1999) and co-author of Meeting the Stress Challenge (Russell House Publishing, 1996).

References

¹ C Jones and T Novak, Poverty, Welfare and the Disciplinary State, Routledge, 1999
² N Thompson, M Murphy, S Stradling, Dealing with Stress, Macmillan, 1994
³ N Thompson, M Murphy and S Stradling, "Stress and organisational culture," British Journal of Social Work, 1996