BJSW Advance Access originally published online on October 31, 2005
British Journal of Social Work 2007 37(1):107-122; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bch346
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Social Care and the Modern Citizen: Client, Consumer, Service User, Manager and Entrepreneur
Peter Scourfield is a qualified social worker who worked as a social worker for Cambridgeshire Social Services for many years. From 2000 to 2003, he combined working in a team for older people and adults with a physical disability with lecturing part-time in the social work department at Anglia Polytechnic University (APU). Since 2003, he has been a full-time lecturer in social work and social policy.
Correspondence to Peter Scourfield, Institute of Health and Social Care, APU, East Road, Cambridge CB11PT, UK. E-mail: p.scourfield{at}apu.ac.uk
Since coming to power, New Labour has embarked on a programme of modernization. Few areas of state activity have been more visibly subjected to New Labour’s modernization agenda than the personal social services. Local authority social services departments have largely ceased to exist as separate organizational entities. However, modernization has also required that the relationship between state and citizen be reconstructed. This is evident in New Labour’s vision for adult social care which envisages a move towards individual budgets. The individualizing nature of such schemes may be thought hard to reconcile with the discourse of integration and partnership prominent elsewhere. However, a key linking concept is that of ‘person-centredness’. It is often assumed that this simply means that public services become more flexible to meet the needs of ‘the person’. This paper uses the example of direct payments to demonstrate how modernization also requires flexibility of ‘the person’. It would appear that inherent in New Labour’s project of modernization is the assumption that the modern citizen should be both managerial and entrepreneurial. What were once public responsibilities are being transferred to the individual. The implications for the users of adult social care are discussed.
Keywords: modernization, adult social care, direct payments
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