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By John Harris.
Routledge
£16.99
ISBN 0415224888

Social work in the pre-business era, according to this book, was free to set its own agenda.

Then came the neo-liberal policies of the Conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s - through community care policies, marketisation, managerialism, performance indicators and the like.

Although the story has been told before, no other book has pursued this makeover - the complete inversion of social work's aims - so rigorously and in such detail.

Along the way the author includes a wickedly accurate picture of the Central Council for Education and Training's flailing efforts to hitch a ride on this particular wave; a sceptical, and probably justified assessment of the voluntary sector's role in the process; and an account of the Labour's government's modification - but not undoing - of the business ethos.

John Harris might have acknowledged the relatively larger space for public, non-market objectives within New Labour's social policy. For example is Best Value only to be understood as a "quasi-business regime"? Yet, when he presses his argument a little too far on occasion we have a clearer, more detailed understanding of the essential direction that the social work profession is taking.

John Pierson is senior lecturer, institute of social work and applied social studies, Staffordshire University.