Systemic Principles in the Policy Domain: Implications for Practice?

1
Systemic Principles in the Policy Domain
Implications for Practice?

• Steve J Hothersall
• The Robert Gordon University
• Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.

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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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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Hierarchical Policy Systems
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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

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• 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.

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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.