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BJSW Advance Access originally published online on March 17, 2007
British Journal of Social Work 2007 37(3):387-403; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcm016
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved.

Increasing User Choice or Privatizing Risk? The Antinomies of Personalization

Iain Ferguson

Dr Iain Ferguson is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Stirling, Scotland. Prior going into social work education, he worked for many years as a social worker and community worker in the West of Scotland. He has published widely in the fields of asylum seekers, mental health user involvement and critical social work theory. His publications include Rethinking Welfare (with Michael Lavalette and Gerry Mooney (Sage, 2002)) and two edited collections: Globalisation, Global Justice and Social Work (with Michael Lavalette and Elizabeth Whitmore (Routledge, 2004)) and International Social Work and the Radical Tradition (with Michael Lavalette (Venture Press, 2006)).

Correspondence to Dr Iain Ferguson, Department of Applied Social Science, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK. E-mail: iain.ferguson{at}stir.ac.uk

Within a very short space of time, the concept of personalization has come to occupy a central place within dominant social work and adult care discourses within the UK. Through an analysis of one influential model of personalization, this paper will explore the factors behind the concept’s current popularity. I shall argue that this popularity is due primarily to its congruence with key themes of New Labour thought, including individualization, responsibilization and the transfer of risk from the state to the individual. I shall conclude that, given its acceptance of the marketization of social work and social care, its neglect of issues of poverty and inequality, its flawed conception of the people who use social work services, its potentially stigmatizing view of welfare dependency and its potential for promoting, rather than challenging, the deprofessionalization of social work, the philosophy of personalization is not one that social workers should accept uncritically.

Keywords: personalization, consumerism, responsibilization, deprofessionalization


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