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Policy alienation in frontline social work – a study of social workers’ responses to a major anticipated social and health care reform in Finland

Publiceringsår

2022

Upphovspersoner

Tammelin, Mia; Mänttäri-van der Kuip, Maija

Abstrakt

Change in the policy and ideology governing social and health care has been much debated in the Western welfare states, including in Finland, where the public sector has witnessed a shift towards a market and managerial ideology in a climate of austerity. These changes affect organisations as well as individual workers. Social workers implement social policies in their daily work, and are thus positioned in between policies and clients. This may expose them to feelings of unease in the implementation of certain policies. In this study, we apply the policy alienation framework of Tummers and colleagues (2009. “Policy Alienation of Public Professionals: Application in a new Public Management Context.” Public Management Review 11 (5): 685–706) in analysing the responses of social workers to a major social and health care reform prepared in Finland in 2015–2019. By applying problem-driven content analysis to interview data, we study how social workers responded to the proposals for reform, and how the two dimensions of policy alienation, i.e. experiences of meaninglessness and powerlessness, were manifested. The findings suggest that policy alienation is widespread among social workers and that experiences of powerlessness and meaninglessness are common. The social workers experienced powerlessness in relation to specific policies and practices. They also viewed the reform as meaningless, as it lacked socially relevant goals.
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Organisationer och upphovspersoner

Jyväskylä universitet

Mänttäri-van der Kuip Maija Orcid -palvelun logo

Publikationstyp

Publikationsform

Artikel

Moderpublikationens typ

Tidning

Artikelstyp

En originalartikel

Målgrupp

Vetenskaplig

Kollegialt utvärderad

Kollegialt utvärderad

UKM:s publikationstyp

A1 Originalartikel i en vetenskaplig tidskrift

Publikationskanalens uppgifter

Volym

16

Nummer

1

Sidor

19-35

Publikationsforum

75124

Publikationsforumsnivå

1

Öppen tillgång

Öppen tillgänglighet i förläggarens tjänst

Nej

Parallellsparad

Ja

Övriga uppgifter

Vetenskapsområden

Psykologi; Social- och samhällspolitik

Nyckelord

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Publiceringsland

Förenade kungariket

Förlagets internationalitet

Internationell

Språk

engelska

Internationell sampublikation

Nej

Sampublikation med ett företag

Nej

DOI

10.1080/17496535.2021.1977836

Publikationen ingår i undervisnings- och kulturministeriets datainsamling

Ja