The impact of globalization on social work in the UK

Abstract

Since the late 1980s social work in the UK has undergone a period of unremitting change affecting its organizational structure, value-base, and service users. There has been a regretable narrowness of scope in the social work literature on such changes as if they were simply new technical responses to the problems of reorganizing social services. We argue that such analyses do not engage sufficiently with the complex dynamics driving these changes and that there is a need to contextualize change in social work against the wider political and economic context. <br/>The transformative nature of the contemporary period is posited with the reference to the impact of global macrolevel forces and the ways that these interact with national and political variables on micro-level forces and the ways that these interact with national and political variables on micro-level forms of social work practice. This paper reviews selective literature on globalization and draws linkages with changes in social services at the agency and practitioner level in the UK.