IMPROVING PRACTICE BY RESEARCH: USING EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE IN THE WORKPLACE

The reported experience of many front-line social workers and of others in the social welfare field is of an increasingly top-down managerialist practice environment that is driven by detailed regulation, procedural routines, and targets subject to continuous monitoring. This experience is matched by diminishing opportunity for professional judgement and relationship-based practice that values process as well as outcomes. The economic, political and policy factors behind these developments are described and the resulting tension within the social welfare professions is analysed in terms of „two moral voices‟: an instrumental utilitarianism on the one hand and a more traditional ethics of the „service ideal ‟ on the other (Banks, 2004). While both „voices‟ are required in any public service endeavour, the former is currently submerging the latter to an extent that is dangerous because, in the current authoritarian policy climate, instrumentalism can be observed to slip into amoral techno-rationalism. The author defends the importance of individual moral agency that is associated with the service ideal and he argues this needs to be proclaimed and, to a