A social worker with two watches: Synchronizing the left and right ideologies

Abstract

Accompanying the diminishing voice of the client in cross-subsidized social work, the author makes an attempt to reveal the ambivalence and ambiguity of state-sponsored social work in Hong Kong. In light of the increase in quasi-welfare markets that promote an environment of competitive bidding on government subventions, this article addresses the contradictions between commercial and social work values after the commodification of welfare. Because frontline practitioners are becoming more reluctant to be involved in ‘typical’ social work interventions, reconsidering and recalculating costs are recommended under the pendulum of left and right ideologies in a postcolonial, neoliberal metropolis.

Keywords

Cross-subsidization layered account neoliberalism reflective practice state-sponsored social work subvented services youth work

Introduction

A famous quote by Lee Segall states, ‘A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure’. This quote also relates to the situation of contemporary social work practitioners, that is, being swung by the pendulum between ideologies. Woodcock (2012) asks US social workers a question: ‘Where do you stand?’ Along the sociopolitical spectrum, he identifies neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and communitarianism as three significant contemporary ideological variations. Acknowledging the reminder from Chu et al. (2009) that social work is inevitably political, he urges for action to help social workers to interpret dialogs, understand clients’ views, and identify potentially divergent threads in their own political orientations. Stanford (2011) reinforces the importance of being active and purposive for Australian social workers, who practice within the morally conservative context of a neoliberal risk society, because policy, service delivery systems, and practices are permeated by neoliberal ethics. In the process of developing a burgeoning social care industry, the beliefs and ideals of the social work profession are being challenged by the process of privatization (Carey, 2008; Ferguson, 2008). However, referring to Hyslop (2012), there is a paradox of social democracy in the capitalist paradigm when the practice of state-sponsored social work is controlled by advanced bureaucratic modernity. For the liberal and social democratic (Esping-Andersen, 1990) welfare states, that is, the United Kingdom and Sweden, respectively, ‘marketization and the commodification of welfare services provide the opportunities for choice but also the minimization of cost’. Legislative change, audit, managerialism and performativity are measures by which political and policy directives are maintained’ (Harlow et al., 2013: 545).

In 1997, Hong Kong was reconstituted as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after more than 150 years of British governance. Indeed, social welfare services were already well developed before the handover to China. In 1947, the Social Welfare Office of the colonial government was first established under the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs. The Social Welfare Advisory Committee (SWAC) and the Hong Kong Council of Social Service (HKCSS) were also formed in the same year. A decade later, the Social Welfare Office became the Social Welfare Department (SWD), which is now under the Labour and Welfare Bureau (LWB) of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). The Hong Kong Social Workers’ General Union was formed in the early 1980s. In 1997, the Social Workers Registration Bill was passed, and the Social Workers Registration Board was established in 1998. Since the change in sovereignty in 1997, the long-time partnership between the SWD and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has been transformed into a contractual relationship. Referring to Lee (2009), the expectation is that social services will be more efficiently and effectively delivered and with good quality. This expectation includes introducing competitive bidding, enhancing the tripartite (i.e. government, business sector, and public involvement) format of offering welfare programs, restructuring the funding mechanisms (i.e. subvention funding), and so on.

Incongruously, in local social work education, the predominant discourses praise the leftist ideology that social workers should embrace the concepts of welfare rights and entitlement rather than supporting the laissez-faire policy and non-interventionist approach that are highly appreciated by the government. Many predecessors in the field who once praised leftist idealism in the 1970s are now senior managers and top executives in local agencies. Some of them are now as ‘right’ as the bourgeoisie when addressing budget cutbacks, resource management, and corporate governance. Although the residual emphasis in colonial governance and the outcry about individual responsibility for sustaining self-reliance in the postcolonial SAR government are challenged by frontline practitioners and local academics (Chan, 2004), there is a drive to improve the cost-effectiveness and quality of services via market forces. Safeguarding the ‘social’ mission on one level while simultaneously ‘working’ through market and quasi-welfare mechanisms creates tension between social workers and managers, clients, stakeholders, and the general public and has always been an uneasy and uncomfortable task for frontline practitioners. Reamer (1993) reminds us not to overlook the philosophical debate regarding the concept of rights or, more precisely, claim rights. Welfare rights should not be based on any assumptions; they should be absolute and unconditional. Block et al. in 1987 and Piven and Cloward in 1982 (both cited in Reamer, 1993) argued that ‘welfare should be viewed as a fundamental right that offers essential protection against the destructive byproducts of a capitalist system’ (p. 30). In contrast, welfare as a privilege, rather than a right, means that benefits are merely products of the community’s generosity. For Harris (2003), the emergence of a business-like service mode is not merely technical or managerial. It has deep personal implications for social workers as well.

Purpose

Consumer-driven and market-based social services are not uncommon in Hong Kong. However, referring to Fine (2002), self-victimization by consumerism has become a cliché in the modern world. A coherent analysis of the phenomenon in terms of cause and effect is lacking. Managerial appraisals over professional values remain one of ‘the great debates’ in managerialism, for instance, autonomy versus control, technical skills versus management skills, quality versus cost-effectiveness, and ethical responsibility versus corporate efficiency (Sinclair, 1997). However, such critical debates on social work professionalism should not be the patent of academics in ivory towers. Rather, practitioners should by all means reposition themselves in contemporary practice. To reveal the ambivalence and ambiguity of state-sponsored (i.e. subvented) social work in a postcolonial, neoliberal metropolis, the state-sponsored youth social work setting in Hong Kong is selected as a case example to illustrate how frontline social workers and clients are being marginalized in light of the monetization of social services, social work managers’ power struggles, administrative control of social service providers, and the de-professionalization of social work. The purposes of this article are twofold. The first goal is to allow readers to understand the extent to which social work services are compromised by multiple bosses in an environment of minarchism and positive non-interventionism. The second is, by addressing the estrangement between state-sponsored welfare and emancipatory social work practice in postcolonial Hong Kong, to demonstrate how frontline services are compromised by a focus on monetary calculations.

Methods

Rather than using our taken-for-granted methods of collecting and analyzing data, I adopted the ‘layered account’, that is, a ‘postmodern ethnographic reporting format that enables the researcher in question to draw on as many resources as possible in the writing process, including theory and lived experience’ (Ronai, 1997: 420), as the method for presenting my findings. This approach is challenging; it aims to enrich the writer’s narrative by filling the gaps in interpretation with layers of experience. It empowers readers to project themselves into the text and generate meaning from their interpretations of the writer’s narrative (Markham, 2005; Ronai, 1995, 1997; Sprenkle and Moon, 1996). By selecting the layered account as a qualitative social research method, Fry (2010) observes that ‘the process of sharing advanced drafts with critical friends and submitting it for peer review also allowed me to refine my analysis and writing’ (p. 1171) and, most importantly, the process can particularly address the writer’s biases and blind spots. Prior to publication, drafts of this article were reviewed by my critical friends, colleagues, social work teachers, and five anonymous reviewers of two renowned social work journals. Over the last 2 years, the content of this article has been significantly revised since the first draft was produced. The frequent and ongoing experience of being swung between the left and right ideologies has given me the motivation to undertake this study. I have worked in the children and youth setting for over a decade, and I am particularly committed to the state-sponsored Integrated Children and Youth Services Centres (ICYSCs). I received social work education in Hong Kong after the handover to China (i.e. during the postcolonial era). Based on my firsthand experiences, observations, and critical reflections in frontline and administrative positions (Cheung, 2014, 2015), I attempt to outline the dilemmatic position of social workers in state-sponsored children and youth work as well as the ambivalence and ambiguity of state-sponsored social work in Hong Kong. I have studied literature on the neoliberal influence on social work managerialism and the corresponding impacts on professionalism. In light of the pendulum of ideologies, a case study of social services administration in Hong Kong is conducted by referring to down-to-earth examples in state-sponsored youth work.

Literature review

The development of state-sponsored (subvented) social work in Hong Kong

State-sponsored funding (i.e. subvention) is a financing source used by the HKSAR government through the SWD to support the current expenditure requirements of approved social welfare service units. Over the last decade, the Lump Sum Grant Subvention System (LSGSS) has been one of the predominant models of public funding and financial control of NGOs in Hong Kong. The LSGSS refers to a set amount paid to NGOs to provide specified services under certain Funding and Service Agreements (FSAs). There are no constraints on how NGOs use the funding, and there is no reclaiming of surpluses or topping up of deficits. Before the LSGSS, welfare services were provided through an inflexible, complex, and bureaucratic system (Lump Sum Grant Independent Review Committee, 2008). Flynn (2002) reminds us that how services are financed could serve as a distinction between the public and private sectors. If the service is primarily financed by taxation, it is still considered to be public and should be accountable to the public rather than to shareholders, even though money is exchanged between service users and providers at the point of consumption. Public service shares a common goal with its private counterpart in attracting people to use it, but it is not confined to people who pay for it while excluding others. However, private services focus strongly on strategies of market segmentation, propagandism, cost calculation, persuading customers to return by providing good service, and so on. Setting aside the fact that the LSGSS has received more complaints than compliments, it is important to have a substantive debate about the essence of services in terms of public or private, especially since the introduction of the LSGSS as a means to provide NGOs with the autonomy and flexibility to deploy resources and reengineer their services. On witnessing public organizations behave as if they are business-like entities, Clarke and Newman (1997) describe the reduction in distinctions between the state and the market, that is, the public and private sectors, as a de-differentiation process. For most of the state-sponsored NGOs in Hong Kong, despite differences in the levels of tasks, responsibilities, and power dispersed to stakeholders, their survival largely depends on government subsidies. Hence, local academics (Chui and Ko, 2011) address the need to discuss issues of reshuffling public–private responsibility or the interface between state and citizen welfare.

The marketization and commodification of social work

Flynn (2002) argues that markets may offer a solution to the problem of professional control and provide alternatives to bureaucratic and hierarchical management. Stolt et al. (2011) conducted a study in Sweden, a welfare state that previously had nearly zero private providers in the healthcare and social service sectors. They conclude that private care providers appear to emphasize service aspects rather than structural prerequisites for good care. Another scholar, Savas (2002), asserts that competitive contracting has resulted in a satisfactory level of competition in New York. However, Flynn (2002) foresees that in the long run, organizations could become ‘fragmented, jobs are insecure and managers and workers would probably benefit from leaving and setting up their own company’ (p. 128). The introduction of the market into welfare has brought a strong emphasis on the customer orientation. Howe (1996) uses the word ‘commodities’ to describe welfare services and the phrase ‘vehicle for marketplace dealings’ to identify worker–client relationships. For school support services in Hong Kong, abundant time-based or project-based contracts are issued accordingly. In fact, stakeholders’ perspectives are more important than clients’ needs. Stakeholders include the Education Bureau, school management committees, school principals, managerial staff, teachers, parents, and students (who generally have the least influence and do not have a say). Social work managers should try their best to persuade these school stakeholders to support continuous financial allocations to safeguard the stability and sustainability of services. This position echoes the assertion by Howe (1996) that the ‘personal relationship between social worker and client is in itself no longer regarded as an essential ingredient of professional practice’ (p. 94). Harris (2003) critically reviews how business culture has fundamentally shifted the nature of social work. He concludes as follows, regarding the effect of managerial incursions into social work over the last 25 years in the United Kingdom:

Constrained by cash limits and the intensification of competitive forces through quasi-markets, are shown to have resulted in a range of measures for controlling the activities of social workers … the attempts made to create customers for the social work business, by re-imaging or perhaps more accurately re-imagining, the people on the receiving end of social work. (pp. 7–8)

The hidden agenda of resource reallocation

Fung and Hung (2011) explain the intentions of the Hong Kong SAR government in merging Community Centres (CCs) into family services and terminating Neighbourhood Level Community Development Projects (NLCDPs) by comparing ‘findings of past studies that the governments of developed and developing countries manipulate the “community” as a policy tool in the current era of neo-liberalist economic globalization’ (p. 459). For human service practitioners, financial reallocation, service repositioning and process reengineering, and so on are well-known jargons nowadays in the name of reacting to economic globalization. Long-term planning for social welfare services ceased after 1999. Before that, the government had adopted a Five-Year Plan (FYP) mechanism and conducted periodical reviews in the past to monitor the extent to which the policy objectives relate to various welfare services as set out in the White Papers. FYP was later considered as inflexible and unable to cope with the ever-changing needs of our society (Social Welfare Advisory Committee, 2010).

In fact, substantial resources for children and youth social services have been reallocated from the SWD to the Home Affairs Bureau over the last decade. However, social workers must still work despite the changes in funding sources. Fundamental differences in the values and objectives of the two parties contribute to different directions in service delivery. For the former, one of the objectives in youth work is to help ‘young people to become responsible and contributing members of society through a wide range of programmes and activities’, whereas for the latter, ‘building Hong Kong as a vibrant, caring and harmonious community’ is clearly written in the vision and mission statement. From a structural or progressive point of view, professional social workers might find contradictions between becoming responsible and contributing members of society and building harmonious communities. Similar to the examples given by Fung and Hung (2011) earlier in this section, the gestures of resource reallocation are not without subsidiary concerns.

Findings and insights

Case illustration: State-sponsored ICYSC

By adopting a ‘total person approach’, the ICYSC aims to support and develop children and youth to become happy, mature, responsible, and contributing members of society by providing a variety of services including guidance and counseling, supportive service for young people in disadvantaged circumstances, socialization programs, and development of social responsibility and competence, in order to meet the multifarious needs of children and youth in a specific catchment area. At the time of writing this article, there are a total of 138 state-sponsored ICYSCs in Hong Kong. Each of them provides children and youth centre services, outreaching social work and school social work services under the management of one single NGO in the same catchment area. In the following paragraphs, I will discuss the findings and insights by referring to real-life examples in ICYSCs.

A social worker with two or more watches: The multiple bosses’ phenomenon

In ICYSCs, social workers manage the expectations of different stakeholders. Separate from the SWD, financial resources for children and youth social work services in schools, vocational training, and moral and civic education in community centers are substantially reallocated to other bureaus and departments, namely, the Education Bureau, the Labour Department (LD), and the Home Affairs Bureau, respectively. For these government departments, social work values and perspectives may not be the predominant considerations. However, social workers are typically required to work for these departments when they accept their extra financial support. For example, the Home Affairs Bureau funded ICYSCs to organize programs for young people to promote their sense of belonging to the mother country. It was the responsibility of the social work managers to decide whether to accept the offer or not. If they did, social workers were required not only to listen to their supervisors but also to consider the views of the Bureau and to work with the pertinent government officials.

One might argue that supervisors at ICYSCs serve in the controlling role. However, using the example of ICYSCs’ winning tenders in the bidding on school support services, the school administrators, who are typically the distributors of public subsidies, will sometimes ask for unrealistic performance outcomes (e.g. stopping the deviant behaviors of a specific group of marginalized students and restoring classroom discipline after a few 1-hour-per-session disciplinary training programs) based on a non-social-work perspective. By ensuring the maximum benefit from the cost, schoolteachers and principals generally require social workers to accommodate as many students as possible in a single program. Social work managers who choose not to disappoint the ‘customer’ might either deploy exhaustive manpower or choose to exaggerate the program’s effectiveness. Because ‘the customer is always right’, social work supervisors in ICYSCs have very little say during the negotiation process unless they opt to forgo financial support from the same school in subsequent funding rounds. Indeed, financial sources imply not only budgets but also accountability (Yan et al., 2015). Logically, multiple sources of finance account for heterogeneous expectations. External controls, especially on finances, are common tactics used by politicians to manipulate organizations of professionals. Under the guise of resource reallocation, the roles of social workers and the SWD are preserved in a residualist orientation (Fung and Hung, 2011) and retained within the remedial scope. Other professional disciplines are positioned as stakeholders and consider it their right to intervene in social work services, from the macro level in terms of financial allocation, to the mezzo level in terms of service delivery, and to the micro level in terms of administrative procedure. This intervention serves the purpose of keeping cost savings and people management from the external control of outsiders. However, to emphasize the stakeholders’ interests, social work assessments and interventions are necessarily filtered and altered. Therefore, success given management by multiple bosses is grounded in a process of de-professionalization.

The ‘double/multiple claims’ issues of state-sponsored services in Hong Kong

One of the government-funded resources for youth employment services in Hong Kong is allocated by the LD through the Youth Pre-employment Training Programme and the Youth Work Experience and Training Scheme (YTPTS). These provide case management services, training courses, workplace attachment, and on-the-job training to youth aged between 15 and 24 years whose educational attainment is at the sub-degree level or below. ICYSCs are required to participate in a competitive bidding process to take part in the YTPTS, and they receive direct state-sponsored funding from the LD. In the example of the YTPTS, the ‘average case management service fee per hour is $65 but varies among the training bodies’ (Audit Commission, 2012: 12). ICYSCs could claim service fees by providing case management services. However, there is no control over whether the social worker is employed independently under the scheme funded by the LD. In a similar vein, for the school support services funded by the Education Bureau, social work managers of ICYSCs can reimburse expenses for staff regardless of whether they have in fact employed additional manpower; this ability raises necessary ethical consideration in terms of the double claims issue.

After the implementation of the LSGSS, the SWD of the Hong Kong SAR Government was no longer the sole funding source of social services. As we can see from the examples given in this study, the Education Bureau and LD are other major stakeholders in children and youth social work services. Although social worker positions funded by the SWD still occupy the majority of staff positions, social work managers could take advantage of the financial flexibility in the LSGSS to hire more social workers in non-government-funded positions to expand the scale of service. In that sense, an individual social worker, whose salary is primarily paid by the SWD, could also claim payment simultaneously for his or her services (typically in terms of service charges per hour and/or per client served) from different funding bodies, such as other government departments or corporate or private philanthropy. This double/multiple claims issue in state-sponsored social work service is illustrated by the economics term cross-subsidization. Because discussions on cross-subsidizing social welfare are rather limited in the literature, similar concepts (Faulhaber, 2005; Fujii, 1989; Parsons, 1998) applied to other public services, that is, public transportation and telecommunications, are used. In short, a cross-subsidy is a transfer of resources from one product line or consumer group to another. More precisely, it refers to financing a loss-making line of business with profits earned elsewhere. Yet, as noted by Hancher and Buendia Sierra (1998), ‘at the very heart of the problem of cross-subsidization lies the difficulty of definition’ (p. 904).

Under the LSGSS, state-sponsored agencies are allowed (and encouraged) to sustain and expand their services by utilizing internal cash flows. Most of them are still largely dependent on government funding but are not being fully supported. There is no topping up of deficits even though the actual expenses are not being fully reimbursed. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why social work managers are always more sensitive to numbers than to clients. The more an agency can earn from its non-government-funded services, the better its non-profit-making and/or loss-making state-sponsored services can be cross-subsidized and thus survive. However, it is also noteworthy that under these circumstances, most of the state-sponsored youth service agencies are providing more than the required amount of service, and generally without extra staff. Meanwhile, ICYSC social work managers are often encouraged to maximize their profit by the user-pays principle, proactive fund raising, and acquiring sponsorship. In addition to the laissez-faire policy and non-interventionist approach of the Hong Kong SAR Government, the boundary between the state-sponsored and non-government-funded service sectors within individual agencies has been blurred.

The emerging role of social work services as a product

In Hong Kong, the school attendance rate is over 97 percent among the 3–16 years age group (The Hong Kong Council of Social Service, 2009). Each secondary school has one social worker stationed to provide counseling, group work, support services, and parent work. In 2014, 34 NGOs were identified as school social work service operators for 471 secondary day schools in Hong Kong. The service is operated by NGOs and funded by the SWD. For primary schools, a market-driven Comprehensive Student Guidance Service has been adopted and funded by the Education Bureau. This approach aims to replace the Student Guidance Officers of the Education Department (now known as the Education Bureau) with social workers who are typically hired additionally by the ICYSCs to undertake counseling work at primary schools. Unlike the case for secondary school social work services, eligible NGOs are required to enter a competitive bidding process every year. They must submit tender documents with detailed program planning and budgets for manpower and other resources. A selection board composed of the school principal and other non-social-work managerial staff will consider which tender submission best suits the school. In short, ICYSCs that perform well in 1 year might still lose the service opportunity the next year because of the selection board’s budget, manpower, and/or other administrative concerns.

Advising non-social-work professionals such as those in education to allocate financial resources to social work services is apparently an irreversible trend in the environment of minarchism and positive non-interventionism. Referring to Lee and Wong (2008) from the Guidance and Discipline Section of the Education Bureau, the Comprehensive Student Guidance Service is largely dominated by the decisions of the Education Bureau, academics, school principals, and professional bodies. Irrespective of the unstable nature of services, it is difficult for social work managers not to view the service opportunities in the SARs over 600 primary schools as hens that lay golden eggs. In addition to the Comprehensive Student Guidance Service, the Education Bureau offers a substantial amount of other financial resources to both primary and secondary schools, and ICYSCs are eligible to bid on the school support services. Although financial resources from the Education Bureau are publicly owned, school principals and non-social-work managerial staff are given authority to shop for these services on the market as customers. They choose on behalf of the service users, namely students, those services that they consider the most valuable. Because social work service has become a product, it can be easily reproduced and sold to other customers. Before the beginning of each academic year, ICYSC social work managers generally act as salespersons to promote their ‘products’ to old and new ‘customers’. It is assumed that a program that works for one school might also fit another, and as a result, individual students’ needs are not considered to be a high priority.

Discussion

Managing the social work business by social work managers

Since the introduction of neoliberal ideologies, state-sponsored youth work has become more or less a social work business (Harris, 2003). In a competitive market, organizations are rewarded by higher profits when they provide equivalent outputs at lower input levels than their competitors (Lapsley et al., 1994). Social work managers are expected to run their businesses well by making careful and precise calculations of manpower and financial resources. By providing school support services, NGOs can actually earn profits under the framework of the existing funding system. Theoretically, money earned in this way could have direct or indirect implications for staff compensation and benefits. The SWD no longer imposes rigid input controls on NGOs’ staffing and salary structures or individual items of expenditure (Lump Sum Grant Independent Review Committee, 2008). Rather than maximizing client benefits (not in monetary terms), social workers might wish to maximize the cost-effectiveness of services instead. Productivity analysis, which aims to determine the effectiveness with which scarce resources are allocated, is being employed (Coates, 1980) as a key element in successful bidding. In extreme cases, social workers are merely regarded as human resources to be managed. Social work managers tend to provide services with the least amount of manpower and resources while serving as many students as they can to maximize their net profits (in monetary terms), that is, the difference between total revenue and total cost. Social workers, especially social work managers, are thus required to be more concerned with calculation (Harris, 2003), which promotes a culture of managerialism that subjugates professional values and rewards management skills rather than technical expertise (Sinclair, 1997). Ironically, some managerial staff members and chief executive officers (CEOs) of social service agencies in Hong Kong do not even possess a social work qualification. This lack is based on the school of managerialism concept that a manager can manage anything without understanding the content of what they are managing (Payne, 2000). Indeed, one should also pay attention to Manthorpe and Bradley’s (2002) reminder that ‘we have seen how social workers’ ambivalence to working with finance reflects a desire to avoid crossing the boundary into matters of income and expenditure’ (p. 286). As the boundary becomes blurred, the debate of cash versus care will persist. As suggested by James (1990), although NGOs, non-profit organizations (NPOs), or private voluntary organizations (PVOs) can benefit from their trustworthiness in the eyes of the public because their managers are less likely to cheat consumers, he also notes that ‘nonprofit managers may also divert excessive revenues to staff and emoluments; and may downgrade the quality of one good in order to cross-subsidize another which he or she prefers’ (p. 22).

Within a complex public–private hybrid system under which state-sponsored agencies might sometimes be indistinguishable from social work businesses or government organizations through the gift of subsidies (James, 1990), further academic discussion on the double or multiple claims issue should be elaborated as follows. (1) How should a state-sponsored agency be held accountable to different funders (bosses) while simultaneously preserving its own vision, mission, and values? (2) If a certain agency sector is to be cross-subsidized by another, how can the social impact of services be ‘calculated’ beyond monetary terms? (3) If staff members can be better rewarded through cross-subsidizing from ‘surplus-generating’ services, what could encourage social work managers and frontline practitioners to ‘start where the client is’?

The diminishing voice of the client in cross-subsidized youth work

Rogowski (2012) sums up the changes affecting work with children, families, and youth offenders since the ideological shift from social democracy to neoliberalism in the United Kingdom. He contends that the New Right’s promotion of a laissez-faire policy and non-interventionism against a dependency culture results in the de-professionalization of social work, and thus he advocates possibilities for progressive, radical, and critical practice. In fact, for the case of state-sponsored youth work in Hong Kong, the commodification of welfare has already resulted in contradictions between commercial and social work values. Substantial resources have been reallocated to school support services in light of their cost-effectiveness and accessibility. Chaskin and Richman (1992) have strong reservations regarding whether linking children and youth services to schools serves as an effective model of collaboration. Although statistics indicate that large numbers of clients are being served, they note that there is limited evidence to determine whether these services have become an integrated component within the school and community or whether they have become just another program in the bureaucratic system that overwhelms clients in need. For the sake of generating surplus, producing standardized social work programs in schools is the most common tactic used by agencies to survive on the battlefield. Social workers are expected to administer intensified program sessions to as many students as they can within the shortest period of time. Similar programs can also be reproduced and sold to other schools to save extra effort. Neither the uniqueness of any single practitioner nor the need of any specific client is fully considered. Working with young people in school is not without advantages. Given that they are universal institutions that facilitate universal service provision, ‘going with schools may be easier and safer: easier because so much is already in place’ (Chaskin and Richman, 1992: 111). Nonetheless, the approach of utilizing schools as the lead institutions, which is legitimately the most logical platform choice for social work service delivery, is questioned by ambivalent frontline practitioners in terms of its appropriateness.

That said, abundant children and youth social service resources have been reallocated to other government departments or district councils since the handover to China. Unlike the SWD, these bureaus and councils are not without political missions. The social work programs funded from these sources are expected to promote young people to become politically correct adults through various attractive means, for instance, free concerts by famous pop stars, free adventure-based training camps, and free or low-cost travel opportunities to cities in China as well as to other countries. Frontline practitioners are now more reluctant to become involved in typical social work interventions which are obviously less cost-effective, such as outreaching social work, casework counseling, and social work groups. Social worker managers who support this climate change will continue to expand their business along this de-professionalized trend.

Conclusion

This article portrays a picture of state-sponsored (also known as ‘subvented’ in the context of Hong Kong) youth social work from a pratitioner’s point of view point of view. The increase in quasi-welfare markets in Hong Kong promotes an environment of competitive bidding for government funding. NGOs have shifted their roles from service providers to bid tenders. Before society begins to benefit from public service management through contracts, human service practitioners suffer first. The diluted role of social work disempowers frontline professionals by empowering managers and administrators. There is a tendency to produce and reproduce standardized social work programs to improve the cost-effectiveness and accessibility of services via market forces. However, this reification process ignores individual client and practitioner uniqueness. Typical social work interventions are not welcomed by managers, who instead persuade stakeholders to support continuous financial allocations by introducing surplus-generating products. As Howe (1996) notes, the relationships between social workers and clients have changed from interpersonal to economic, from therapeutic to transactional, from nurturing and supportive to contractual and service-oriented.

Multiple financial sources imply accountability to a heterogeneous collection of stakeholders (Yan et al., 2015). The significance of stakeholders in social services is equivalent to that of shareholders in business. While maintaining a balance of interests among different disciplines, social workers somewhat minimize the voices, needs, and concerns of clients, who also comprise a small – but the most important – stakeholder segment. Representing an agency with a list of services, which may be state-sponsored by the welfare department, funded by other bureaus and councils, and/or supported by corporate sponsorship and private philanthropy, social work practitioners in government-state-sponsored youth social work settings should adopt more sophisticated cost calculation techniques before they enter the battlefield. Llewellyn (1998) contrasts the worth of social work with that of the medical profession and suggests that the latter is seldom threatened by the potential for costs to disrupt the professional image. However, considering the costs in social work, given that the public’s perception of its value is lower, typically disrupts the organizational identity of putting people first and thus jeopardizes frontline professional practice. Typical social work interventions are also not welcomed by practitioners. Because social workers have not achieved full public acceptance of their professionalism, the value of these apparently less appealing services has been heavily underestimated. Boundary work is recommended by Llewellyn (1998), given that ‘forging linkages between costing and caring attempts to restore legitimacy in the eyes of funding agencies and may keep government agencies from even more interventionist measures in professional practice’ (p. 43). Central to this idea is the alignment of costing and care to curtail the professional ambiguity of social work. ‘Once the boundaries between finance and social work practice are made more permeable, finance can inform social workers on “what’s do-able” and a “talk” organization becomes more of an “action” organization’ (p. 39). Otherwise, the public, stakeholders, clients, other professionals, and the ambivalent frontline practitioners cannot be easily convinced in the debate. Costs must be converted from mere data into information. Practitioners should master this common language, that is, numbers, and take the lead in calculating the costs of social work services, given that there is no private-sector benchmark.

From an anti-bureaucratic (Payne, 2000) perspective, a social worker must sort out inflexibilities (i.e. synchronize) among individuals’ needs, the community’s wishes, and the roles of other professionals and their agencies. Meanwhile, a responsible social work agency should accept their workers’ advocacy and anti-bureaucratic roles in representing the needs and views of service users. As a practitioner of children and youth social work service, I echo the assertion of Payne (2000) in promoting advocacy and anti-bureaucratic practice, that is, resolutions to combat overly bureaucratic behavior, before moving forward. I share the sophisticated feelings of a dilemmatic social work practitioner in an atmosphere of managerialism, consumerism, economic rationalism, professionalism, and so on. Professionals resist power shifts, managers struggle to cope with professionals’ values and interests, and bureaucracies must address reluctance toward the introduction of markets. According to Ruch (2007), ‘practitioners need to work within safe containing contexts characterized by: clear organizational and professional boundaries; multifaceted reflective forums; collaborative and communicative working practices; and open and “contextually connected” managers’ (p. 659). One should acknowledge the complexity and uncertainty inherent in contemporary social work practice by addressing the importance of holistic reflective practice. In addition, the pendulum of the left and right ideologies in the postcolonial and neoliberal metropolis is further distorted by the official ideology of the Communist Party of China, which supports creating a socialist market economy, which is well-known as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. The true task here is to define the contemporary meaning of social work in ways that are relevant to both social workers and non-social-work professionals (Bisman, 2004). For a social worker with two watches, it is very likely the best of times and the worst of times to stand out from the crowd and answer Woodcock’s (2012) question: ‘Where do you stand?’

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Special thanks need to be directed to Dr. William Chi-Keung Chu.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Johnson Chun-Sing Cheung, BSW, MsocSc, is a youth worker and a doctoral candidate, Department of Applied Social Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

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