When Social Workers Impact Policy and Don’t Just Implement It

The title of this book might provoke a mirthless laugh from your averagely hard-pressed social worker struggling with scant resources, increasingly, desperate service users and managers who seek to control their every action.The dominant model of the relationship between social workers and social policy is a top-down one with social workers seen as mere implementers of policy, albeit irreverent and resistant ones as the authors nicely put it.Can we see a way forward from this situation to one where social workers might be seen as regular participants in policy-making?The authors certainly recognise the hostile political environments social workers operate in, but they insist that social workers need an understanding of how policy is formulated in various arenas and should be given the skills needed to become 'policy actors'.They argue that teaching such skills should be a core requirement for social work education.Besides, what they mean by 'social workers' is a pretty broad category that includes not just social workers and managers but local and national civil servants and elected officials, social entrepreneurs and academics-thus including quite a few people who might not define themselves as social workers.So Lipsky's famous concept of the streetlevel bureaucrat creatively constructing versions of policy they can implement with their service users is just a small part of the picture (Lipsky, 1980)

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