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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Even further beyond street-level bureaucracy
— the dispersal of discretion exercised in decisions made in older people's care home reviews | | Author(s) | Peter Scourfield |
| Journal title | British Journal of Social Work, vol 45, no 3, April 2015 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press, April 2015 |
| Pages | pp 914-931 |
| Source | www.bjsw.oxfordjournals.org |
| Keywords | Residents [care homes] ; Care homes ; Policy ; Social Services Departments. |
| Annotation | A central tenet of Street-Level Bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980) is that, from the service user's point of view, the discretionary interpretation of policy by front-line practitioners effectively becomes the policy. The managerialisation of social services in the UK has sparked debates over whether it is still possible for practitioners to exercise 'professional' discretion in any meaningful way. However, Evans (2010) has argued that, in a managerialised world, not only do practitioners retain discretion in important areas of work, but managers also exercise significant discretion in how policy is implemented. Evans therefore claims that to understand policy implementation in social services requires going 'beyond street-level bureaucracy' as originally formulated by Lipsky. Based on a case study of how older people's care home placements are reviewed, it is proposed that, in a sector that has been fragmented by both marketisation and privatisation, to understand fully how policy is mediated at the point of delivery, there is a need to go even further beyond the examination of the practices within a single bureaucracy. In this specific setting, the exercise of discretion is multi-layered and dispersed among multiple stakeholders, blurring accountability for decision making and making the task of empowering older care home residents more complex. (rh). |
| Accession Number | CPA-150807207 A |
| Classmark | KX: KW: QAD: PF |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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