Systemic Principles in the Policy Domain: Implications for Practice?

Steve J HothersallThe Robert Gordon University

Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.

The Issues

• Welfare and well-being (eudemonia) should be the focus of social work.

• All social work systems and the organisational systems within which they are nested need to be analysed in relation to the extent to which they address these fundamental issues.

• We can use systemic principles not only to understand what the systems are doing, but also to appreciate whether in fact they are doing what they ought to be doing.

• Any welfare system should include a concern with social needs, health needs, education needs, housing needs, financial needs, etc, etc & et al.

• A welfare ‘system’ does not in fact appear to exist. If there is a ‘welfare hierarchy’, there is little interconnectedness between the levels.

• Rather, we have various separate welfare-related ‘strands’ that do not connect seamlessly. Current ‘reforms’ of the social care and health landscape in the UK are testimony to the lack of systemic thinking regarding well-being.

• The search for profits (in the form of neo-liberal ideologies) dominates the welfare agenda, although even this is disjointed.

• Social work and its systems are low down on the welfare hierarchy and have tended to be dominated latterly by compulsion, compliance and managerialist conceptions of need.

• From a systemic perspective, the basic elements of any system may change without much impact on the system per se. However, if there is poor interconnectedness between the different sub-systems and an ill-defined purpose, the system will collapse or entropy. We have seen this in relation to child care and protection in the UK, recently highlighted by the death of Baby P.

Hierarchical [Policy] Systems

A Pragmatic Solution?

• The development of a ‘systemic’ toolkit that encourages the conscious application of core systemic principles into policy consultation, design, delivery, implementation and evaluation.

• Utilising core systemic principles to assist in ‘mapping’ the extent to which policy intentions equate with social need and the extent to which these are able to be implemented.

• Lipsky

• Practitioners are the key players in relation to policy effectiveness, not policy-makers.

• Therefore, if practitioners are more attuned to the relevance of policy to the requirements of the people being served, policy is likely to become more systemic.

• There is a need for a broad-base of systemic thinkers within the practice domain who, in collaboration with systemically-oriented policy-makers and politicians can begin to map the welfare policy terrain much more effectively.

• This can take place at all system levels.

This presentation was held on a conference of the project „STEP“. The project „STEP“ has been

funded with support from the European Commission.

This publication [communication] reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be

held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.