Institutional Neglect and Pedagogical Possibilities in Social Work Education

Background

Organizational theorists have long understood the benefits of decoupling as a management strategy (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). These benefits include conveying institutional legitimacy externally (Hasenfeld, 1983) while the messiness of human services work is managed internally by workers using discretion to resolve the day-to-day dilemmas of organizational practice (Lipsky, 1980). There is also a rich body of literature that explores the context of human services work and the complexity of worker discretion within these contexts (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003). This study draws on the ideas of organizational decoupling and worker discretion to develop a concept we call institutional neglect. The case study we use to develop this concept is a school of social work education. Our empirical case allows us to probe the dimensions of institutional neglect, including the pedagogical possibilities for social work education, in order to answer the research question: In a context of institutional neglect, what is possible in terms of educational justice and liberatory teaching practice?

Methods

In this multi-auto ethnographic case-study we engage with the intersecting concepts of institutional neglect and pedagogical possibilities to analyze three cases of instructional social work practice. Qualitative data is drawn from our individual experiences within one School of Social Work, across twelve courses taught annually over a ten year span under the leadership of three different Deans. From this data we build three “cases.” A grounded theory approach is used to identify patterns of pedagogical practice within and across cases. This empirical analysis is put into theoretical context, allowing us to build a theory of practice that explains the dimensions of institutional neglect and pedagogical possibilities. To develop the concept of institutional neglect we draw on new institutional and resource dependency theories, and to explain the pedagogical possibilities within such an organizational context we engage with the queer Black feminist theory of bell hooks (1994).

Findings

Early phase analysis suggests that in the site-specific organizational context in which street-level actors (teachers) are all expected to engage in one action (social work education) there are at least five shared dimensions of institutional neglect. These are: a lack of a shared pedagogical framework (values); ambiguous guidelines, norms, or expectations (rules); a lack of supervisory leadership or guidance (support); a lack of meaningful observation, professional development, feedback or evaluation (resources); a goal post that keeps moving and seems only to be made clear after it is met or not met (benchmarks). Within this context we find that the pedagogical possibilities realized can also be characterized by some shared dimensions, including creativity (innovation), consultation and collaboration (interdependence), and self-determination (agency).

Discussion

The concept of institutional neglect rightly suggests a context of resource deprivation. While this study deploys organizational theories to explain the multiple dimensions of institutional neglect in a social work education setting, we turn to queer Black feminist theory to explain the possibilities for educational justice and liberatory teaching practice within. This study suggests that even in constrained and racialized organizational environments there are opportunities for radical and liberatory pedagogical traditions.