Introduction

The ascendant neoliberal paradigm that Banks describes has produced similar effects in the US. The unprecedented centralisation of wealth and power has institutionalised market values throughout society; these include an increased emphasis on outcome measures in the fields of child welfare, criminal justice, public assistance and behavioural health (Soss et al, 2011). Such measures are now a funding requirement of government agencies and major foundations.

The influence of neoliberal values and goals has compelled social workers to reconceptualise their relationship to the state, the market, service users and the community (Reisch, 2009). The shift in focus from personal maintenance to behaviour modification; from long-term stability to short-term outcomes; and from voluntary to compulsory participation has transformed the basic tenets of social work practice and ethics.

Since the 1980s these trends have intensified, particularly after the enactment of ‘welfare reform’ in 1996. Although its proponents emphasise effectiveness and efficiency, the application of these concepts belies their true intentions. ‘Effective’ programme outcomes are measured against goals that are predetermined by elites in isolation from their contexts and other services. As Banks asserts, this focus precludes an examination of the larger structural picture.

Similarly, the determination of programmatic ‘efficiency’ relies exclusively on the application of short-term cost–benefit analysis to the delivery of service ‘commodities’, although social services are commodities of a distinctly different nature. This narrow, managerial focus ignores the social costs of policy decisions, particularly cutbacks, and the impact of recent economic, demographic and cultural changes on clients’ characteristics, needs and patterns of help-seeking and help-utilisation.

Market-oriented values are also reflected in the increased use of resource acquisition as an indicator of personal or organisational success. Funders require programmes serving even marginalised populations to become self-supporting; social work faculties are evaluated by the level of external funding they receive to support their research. The implications of this inversion of means and ends are rarely examined: resource acquisition becomes a primary organisational objective rather than a tool to achieve service goals; the receipt of external grants takes primacy in the determination of scholarly quality over the questions being studied and the societal impact of research.