British Journal of Social Work Advance Access published March 7, 2012

British Journal of Social Work (2012) 1–20

doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcs008

Organisational Rules and Discretion

in Adult Social Work
Tony Evans

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Tony Evans is Professor of Social Work at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research
interests focus on discretion and the policy context of practice, practice research, and
professionalism and professional knowledge.

Correspondence to Tony Evans, Department of Social Work, Royal Holloway, University of

London, Egham, TW20 0EX, UK. E-mail: tony.evans@rhul.ac.uk

Abstract
Being a professional is associated with having a significant degree of freedom in per-
forming one’s work; but social workers, like many professional workers, tend to be
employed within organisations in which they are bound by policies and rules. An influ-
ential analysis of the relationship between social workers and the organisations within
which they work has argued that there has been a proliferation of managerial organisa-
tional rules and that these have eliminated social workers’ discretion. However, this
article argues that, even in rule-saturated organisations, social workers retain significant
freedom in their work, and that the ways in which professionals relate to organisational
rules is a key dimension of understanding discretion. This article employs Oakeshott’s
idea of a dialectic of two attitudes to rules to explore the relationship between organ-
isational rules and professional freedom in adult social work in local authorities. It pre-
sents the findings of a qualitative study that explores social workers’ attitudes to the
formal organisational rules that structure their practice in an English local authority.
The study suggests that, while workers split in how they approach organisations in
line with Oakeshott’s approach, these perspectives are not mutually exclusive, but are
adapted and changed for reasons of pragmatism and principled commitments.

Keywords: Professionalism, discretion, attitudes, organisational rules, Oakeshott

Accepted: January 2012

Introduction

Professionals are workers who are authorised to act with a degree of

freedom from external control in their day-to-day work (Evetts, 2002).

# The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of

The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved.
Page 2 of 20 Tony Evans

However, professionals, who now predominantly work within organisations

(Freidson, 1994), are faced with an environment of organisational rules,
particularly procedures and policies that ‘specify how decisions should be
made and how work processes are to be performed’ (Hatch, 1997,
p. 166). Local authority social workers’ ambivalent position as professional
employees is reflected in their portrayal in English and Welsh law as
required both to act within the authority’s rules, its policies and procedures,
and to use their professional judgement and discretion to decide on the em-
ployment and deployment of these rules (Brayne and Carr, 2010).
The organisational context of practice is complex. It is associated not only

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with formal rules in the form of policies, procedures and organisational
documents, but also with informal rules and understandings within the or-
ganisation. Taken together, these contribute to what has been characterised
as a domain of dynamic organisational processes and operations, what
Strauss et al. have described as a negotiated order: ‘. . . the process of
give-and-take, of diplomacy, of bargaining’ (Strauss et al., 1963, p. 148).
However, while this process of negotiation continues to be an aspect of
the organisational environment of practice, a significant change over the
past twenty years within local authority social services has been the increas-
ing role of managerial strategies of control of professional practice, particu-
larly in the proceduralisation of practice. Associated with this development
there has been a parallel change in the way in which policy makers and man-
agers have come to understand the relationship between the local authority
managers and their professional employees, as principals and agents—the
idea that principals, such as managers, hire the agents, such as practitioners,
to carry out the principal’s instructions (Ulhoi, 2007).
These developments have been reflected in a concern within the social
work literature about the curtailment of professional discretion, the way
in which policies and procedures structure and restrict professional
freedom to practice. There is agreement that there has been a proliferation
of organisational rules governing practice. However, there is disagreement
about the degree to which this may have curtailed discretion. While man-
agerialism may seek to curtail it, professional discretion, in the sense of
freedom within a work role, is a continuing aspect of social work practice
within social services (Evans, 2010). Research looking at this area of prac-
tice tends to focus on the strategies that practitioners can employ to ‘work
around’ formal rules (e.g. Broadhurst et al., 2010); there is, though, little
consideration of professionals’ attitudes to the policies and procedures
that structure their work—do they seek to work in line with rules, do
they work around rules reluctantly, or do they actively seek to circumvent
these rules and only comply when they feel they cannot avoid them? The
relationship between professional discretion and these organisational
rules has re-emerged as a key question in policy and practice. Both the
Social Work Reform Board and the Munro Review have expressed con-
cerns about overly bureaucratised and rule-bound practice. The Munro
 Organisational Rules and Discretion in Adult Social Work Page 3 of 20

Review, for instance, argues that ‘the extent of prescription has not been
helpful . . .. As the system’s dependency on rules and prescription has
grown, there has been insufficient freedom and confidence in exercising
professional judgement’ (Munro, 2011, para. 8.17). However, a notable
aspect of the analysis of the shortcomings of contemporary practice is the
lack of engagement with questions of service resourcing, and a belief in
the view that freeing practitioners from local authority bureaucracy will
lead not only to greater effectiveness, but also to more efficiency. The em-
phasis here is on the promotion of discretion as a resource strategy, to be
flexible within and get more out of rationed resources. Another way of

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understanding this emphasis on discretion is as a way of masking inad-
equate strategic resource allocation by characterising service provision jud-
gements as ‘clinical’ choices (Evans, 2010).
It is increasingly clear that there is a need to consider the relationship
between social workers and formal rules, and social workers’ understanding
of the role of discretion, in the sense of freedom within organisational rules,
in their practice. In this article, I will consider the attitude of practitioners to
the organisational policies and procedures that govern their work. The first
section will outline key aspects of discussions about professional freedom,
organisational rules and discretion, arguing that professional freedom,
while curtailed, continues to operate in managerialised social services,
and I will consider how this leads us to examine the way organisational
rules (and professional discretion) are approached by professional social
workers. The article will then present the findings from a study exploring
attitudes to organisational rules within two adult social care teams in the
same local authority and will use this to examine the ways in which profes-
sional social workers engage with the organisational rules and policies in
their practice.

Professional freedom, organisational rules and discretion

Local authority social work is a particularly interesting profession when
considering tensions between organisational rules and professional
freedom. The core characteristic of a profession is that it is an occupation
that strives for control over key aspects of its work (Freidson, 1970). It is
difficult to find any other fixed set of characteristics that define a profes-
sional group (Hanlon, 1998). Accordingly, the most helpful way to under-
stand professionals is as workers who have a degree of freedom in their
work role, ‘both in respect of their professional judgments and decision-
making, and in respect of their immunity from regulation or evaluation
by others’ (Evetts, 2002, p. 341). Social work as a consolidated profession
and social services departments were established at the same time in
England and Wales—1970—in the wake of the recommendations of the
Seebohm report (Payne, 2005). The new social services departments
Page 4 of 20 Tony Evans

provided a sympathetic institutional home for professional social work, to

the point where professional and organisational identities fused. Social ser-
vices departments, while located within the bureaucratic structure of local
authorities, were strongly influenced by professional principles of practice,
emphasising professional supervisors as supportive colleagues rather than
directive managers, and professional staff operating with a significant
degree of discretion, trusted by fellow professionals who occupied the sig-
nificant hierarchical posts within social services as an organisation
(Harris, 1998; Payne, 2005).
Over the past twenty years, the symbiosis of social work and local author-

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ity social services has broken down with the rise of managerialism. Man-
agerialism is the idea that management is a discrete activity drawing on a
distinct set of notions and skills that, together, assert the right of managers
to manage, employing techniques primarily drawn from the business sector
in the pursuit of economy, efficiency and effectiveness. It has had a signifi-
cant impact on the organisation of local authority social work over the last
two decades, and has been associated with strategies such as performance
and financial management, audit and proceduralisation (Harris, 2003).
Organisational rules—in the form of procedures, eligibility criteria,
etc.—are a key means by which managers govern the work of employees.
Kirchhoff and Karlsson (2010, p. 6) distinguish two types of management
rules: ‘First, legal rules expressed by laws and judicial instructions’ and,
second, ‘local organisational rules, i.e. rules that interpret legal rules to
an organisational context, rules to place employees in different social posi-
tions of the organisation, and rules on how to organise, coordinate and dis-
tribute work’. In this context of a growing body of formal rules seeking to
control practice, it is not surprising that discretion, in the sense of
workers’ freedom to make decisions about how they work (Smith, 1981),
has been considered under threat. Commentators have drawn attention
to the increasingly restrictive nature of managerial control in adult social
work. Researchers argue that social workers are now subject to close mon-
itoring through information systems and the proceduralisation of practice,
to ensure financial and productivity expectations are met (Howe, 1991;
Harris, 1998; Jones, 2001; Carey, 2003, 2008; Kirkpatrick, 2006). Kirkpatrick
(2006), for instance, reviewing the impact of managerialism across adults’
and children’s social services, points to the proliferation of ‘systems for stra-
tegic planning, financial control and the management of contracts’ and,
under New Labour, an amplification of control through the use of perform-
ance targets and indicators.
Within this literature, there has been a tendency to characterise practi-
tioners in adult social work as automata under the control of senior man-
agers (Howe, 1991), themselves in thrall to a managerialist and
neo-liberal ideology (Jones, 1999, 2001). Carey encapsulates two elements
of this argument, identifying proceduralism as restricting ‘the discretion of
state social workers in Britain’ (Carey, 2008, p. 351), and explaining that
 Organisational Rules and Discretion in Adult Social Work Page 5 of 20

acceptance of and compliance with managerially specified roles and rules

has become second nature to practitioners.
Managerialism has had a significant impact within local authority social
services in recent years (Harris, 2003). However, there has to be a question
about the extent—or the possibility—of management success in controlling
social work practice to the extent sometimes argued by its proponents and
critics (Harris and White, 2009). Management rhetoric and the parapherna-
lia of control should not be equated with management control (Clarke and
Newman, 1997, p. 31). Management within social services is internally frac-
tured. Front line managers—team managers and assistant managers—often

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identify more with the professional concerns of the social workers they
manage than with the strategic policy concerns of senior managers to con-
strain spending and meet performance targets (Harris, 1998; Evans, 2009,
2010). It is arguable whether increased proceduralisation has reduced pro-
fessional freedom and whether such procedures are simply or necessarily
resources for management control.
Policies and procedures can build up into a complex, interrelated body of
organisational rules that requires professional judgement to interpret, ne-
gotiate and prioritise. Paradoxically, more rules can create uncertainty
and room for interpretation and choice. The rules that constitute organisa-
tional policy and procedures are internally complex. Rules have to be
ordered and interpreted, and this gives rise to different views of what the
rules mean, which rules take priority and how the rules fit together
(Evans, 2010). A policy such as the community care reforms in England
in the 1990s, for instance, had different elements ‘including being user-led
in the meeting of needs, increasing choice for service users and controlling
the costs incurred by Social Services Departments—and these could be
prioritised and described in significantly different ways by different
actors’ (Evans and Harris, 2004, p. 886). Furthermore, policy makers
have also come to acknowledge that:

Policy does not come neatly tied up in sealed packages. It is made as people
and organisations interpret it, translate it, try to make it meaningful within
the frames of reference they bring to their work, and shape it in innovative
ways (Department of Health, 2007, pp. 106 –7).

These issues touch on a central tension in modern welfare systems. Within

the welfare state, street-level bureaucrats such as social workers have had
the role of mediating policy statements and the delivery of day-to-day ser-
vices (Lipksy, 2010). Research examining contemporary adult social care
services illustrates the tension between policy and day-to-day practice.
This literature presents a picture of a rule-saturated environment, which
still assumes discretion-infused practice (e.g. Ellis et al., 1999; Robinson,
2003; Bradley, 2003; Ellis, 2007; Evans, 2010). Bradley, for instance, identi-
fies ‘insufficient clarity or openness in local procedures . . . coupled with
local political and economic expediency . . . as significant factors in creating
Page 6 of 20 Tony Evans

extensive discretion in application of charges for services amongst practi-

tioners and managers’ (Bradley, 2003, p. 653).

Organisational rules, discretion and choices

The view that social workers unthinkingly accept the organisational rules
that frame their practice (e.g. Carey, 2008) is problematic. This broad-brush
claim assumes that acceptance of rules within social services entails accept-
ance of alien priorities and commitments. However, in a professional

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service such as local government, social work, organisational rules and pro-
cedures are as likely to reflect professional and broader rights concerns as
managerial concerns. Robinson (2003) makes precisely this point when she
reports the findings from her study of the introduction of assessment sche-
dules and procedures into a probation team. She found that, alongside some
resistance, there was also positive acceptance of the rules because they rein-
forced and supported practitioners’ own view of good professional practice.
Any set of rules is likely to have the potential of use in a range of different
ways and, as such, they may be a resource to promote professional goals as
much as management control. Rules can hold actors to account; they
require certain things to be done; they identify who is responsible. Eligibil-
ity criteria, for instance, politicise individual service provision by making
political decisions less opaque and locating responsibility for inadequate
resources with politicians and strategic managers; they also have the poten-
tial to clarify the process of resource allocation, supporting service users’
rights to equal treatment and public accountability.
Professional freedom within local authority adult services is beset by ten-
sions: management rules, political ambivalence, professional aspirations
and the complex lives of citizens in need. Agamben (2005) sees such ten-
sions as inherent in the work of the modern state. It is an arena of ambiguity
and imprecision—what he terms the ‘state of exception’—the liminal zone
between law and action, the tension between a commitment to following
rules and freedom to respond to the fluidity of real life. Agamben’s perspec-
tive confronts us with the essentially ethical and political nature of discre-
tion and recognises it as a context in which actors have to decide and
act: ‘. . . law in its non-relation to life and life in its non-relation to law
means to open a space between them for human action, which once
claimed for itself the name of “politics”’(Agamben, 2005, p. 88).
How do professional social workers approach rules—do they, for in-
stance, see them as authoritative and precise or are they seen as fuzzy,
open guidelines? A useful starting point is Oakeshott’s seminal analysis
of the dialectical opposition at the heart of the contemporary state
(Kelly, 2010, p. 24). He identifies a shifting and uneasy combination of
two ways of thinking about ‘the character of the state and of the office of
its government’ (Oakeshott, 1975, p. 323)—the first a rule-respecting
 Organisational Rules and Discretion in Adult Social Work Page 7 of 20

perspective he calls ‘nomocracy’ and the second a goal-focused perspective,

‘telocracy’. In nomocracy, according to Oakeshott, rules are important in
themselves. They should be respected and followed because they are the
rules. They are not valued in relation to some external purpose, although
Oakeshott associates the commitment to rules by its nature with security
and stability (Plant, 2010). Rules do not achieve particular outcomes;
they are general and impartial, established and predictable. In contrast,
from the telocracy perspective, rules are ways of achieving or at least
moving towards some greater goal. A classic example of this is the
welfare state seeking to promote the welfare of its citizens. From this

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point of view, Oakeshott argues, laws and rules are of secondary import-
ance and are simply means to an end.
These two approaches relate to different ways in which officials such as
local authority social workers think about and engage with the rules and
their ideas of discretion. As Plant notes:

. . . laws and rules will always be general and they will need to be interpreted
and specified in particular contingent circumstances . . .. Oakeshott wants to
argue that this process of relating the generality of law to specific circum-
stances differs in quite fundamental ways between nomocracy and telocracy
(Plant, 2010, p. 8).

The nomocratic mindset approaches the law and rules as general and clear.
The problems that tend to arise in applying rules to particular circumstances
require interpretation, which simply seeks precision and clarification; it is a
predictable and transparent process. The telocratic approach, on the other
hand, embraces discretion: rules are understood in relation to overall goals,
and are not of value in themselves: ‘these arrangements, practices, rules and
routines are no more than the prudential disposition of the available
resources . . . desirable in terms of their utility, which itself lies in their func-
tionality’ (Oakeshott, 1983, p. 124). Rules can be approached flexibly and
even changed or discarded if this makes them better able to achieve the
desired goal.
For Oakeshott, these two approaches are heuristic: ‘. . . it may be that the
most one can do is to offer these terms as the most effective apparatus for
understanding the actual complexity of the state’ (Oakeshott, 1975, p. 323).
A particular strength of this approach in exploring professional social
workers’ response to organisational rules is the weight placed on under-
standing people’s reactions in terms of their own conceptions and evalua-
tions of their particular situations. Oakeshott is clear that, while it is
possible to discern these approaches in the way public services are orga-
nised and in the way people approach them, ‘What has to be accounted
for is not the presence of either of these two characterizations, but a polit-
ical imagination which is itself constituted in a tension between them’
(Oakeshott, 1975, p. 320). For Oakeshott, the way to explore this tension
Page 8 of 20 Tony Evans

is in its concrete, contingent and changing form—‘a historic response’—not

simply theoretically, but in practice (Oakeshott, 1975, p. 326).

The study: context and methodology

The findings reported here come from a small qualitative study following up
a case study, which looked at social workers’ experience of discretion within
adult services in an English local authority (Evans, 2010, 2011). The original
case study examined social worker discretion within the context of increas-

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ing managerial control and proceduralisation of practice and involved prac-
titioners and local managers, all of whom were qualified social workers. It
found that, while there were copious organisational rules apparently limit-
ing social work freedom, these practitioners continued to exercise discre-
tion. In part, this was because the proliferation of rules actually
contributed to discretion by presenting professionals with conflicting, con-
fusing and over-elaborate procedures that had to be prioritised, interpreted
or ignored in practice. Furthermore, contrary to the often presented picture
of managers and professionals as antagonistic groups, local team managers
and the practitioners worked together to interpret and apply formal organ-
isational rules (prescribed by strategic managers) in a way that conformed
to their ideas of professionalism in social work. In the process of conducting
the case study, it became apparent that the interviewees had different feel-
ings and attitudes towards a work environment of organisational rules and
opportunities for discretion, despite the fact that they all described them in
a broadly similar way.
The subsidiary study developed from this observation to look at the ques-
tion of how these practitioners and local managers viewed policies and pro-
cedures. Did they feel that that they were bound by these rules? If so, why?
And if not, why not? The subsidiary study involved eight practitioners and
four local managers: four practitioners and two managers from an older
persons’ team and four practitioners and two managers from a mental
health team. All interviewees were qualified social workers. The local man-
agers were the longest qualified (between twelve and twenty-three years);
practitioners in the older persons’ team tended to be the shortest time quali-
fied (between two and six years, although one person had been qualified for
twenty years), while practitioners in the mental health team tended to be
qualified for a longer period (two practitioners had been qualified for
over fifteen years and the other two had been qualified for around five
years each). The interviewees had all participated in the earlier case
study. Of these interviewees, nine were female and three male (one practi-
tioner in each team and one manager in one team) and all but one—a black
African practitioner—were white British. While this profile broadly reflects
the gender/ethnic profile within adult social work in England (The NHS In-
formation Centre, 2011), a small-scale study such as this cannot represent
 Organisational Rules and Discretion in Adult Social Work Page 9 of 20

the views of a population. Rather, it is designed to be explorative, offering

insights and opening up avenues for discussion and further exploration
(Dey, 2004).
Individual interviews were conducted with the practitioners and the local
managers. The interviews were semi-structured, made up of the following
three themes: whether rules, particularly eligibility criteria, should always
be applied equally; whether it was ever permissible to bend, ignore or
break such formal rules; and which reasons guided practitioners’ approach
to the application of these rules in practice. This approach sought to balance
a thematic structure with room for participants to express their own per-

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spective and understandings (Flick, 1998).
The individual interviews were transcribed and data categorised. Cat-
egories are means of enhancing comprehension of data by organising ma-
terial, but they are not guided by unambiguous rules; rather, they are a
matter of judgement and, as such, continuously open to revision and chal-
lenge (Dey, 2004). The initial analysis of interviews was guided by a theor-
etical understanding based on the themes and ideas identified in the existing
literature (as reflected in the earlier sections of this article); but this theor-
etical understanding was also subject to critical analysis in an iterative en-
gagement with the detailed findings. This understanding helped organise
the data and the data, in turn, challenged and questioned the pre-existing
understanding (Gadamer, 1975). An assumption in much of the literature,
for instance, is that managers and practitioners are distinct categories with
very different attitudes to organisational rules (Evans, 2009). Accordingly,
a key dimension of analysis was to compare the attitude to organisational
rules of the practitioner and local manager groups, and to critically
examine this assumption in the light of these data. Through this process,
ideas were connected on the basis of a perspective that helped to make
sense of the data. This process is a claim not that the ideas reflect an under-
lying reality contained in the data, but rather that the analysis is developing
a perspective that helps make sense of the data. This perspective does not
claim to be the only one, but it is one that aims to provide a rich understand-
ing of the phenomena:

. . . what is discovered is not so much a new phenomenon per se as a

meaning or interpretation. America became the New World through ‘dis-
covery’, not of a continent already well inhabited, but of its new connections
with what became the ‘old’ world (Dey, 2004, p. 91).

The study proposal was reviewed and approved in line with the University
of Warwick research ethics guidelines. Interviewees were re-invited to par-
ticipate on the basis of informed consent (and were informed of their right
to withdraw during the interview process). As part of the process of renego-
tiating access, participants were once again assured that study data, such as
quotes, would be anonymised and the names of third parties/institutions
excised.
Page 10 of 20 Tony Evans

Findings
Kirchhoff and Karlsson (2010) point to the distinction between legal rules
and organisational rules that interpret and relate these to specific organisa-
tional contexts. All the practitioners and local managers in the study saw
themselves as bound by the law—this was seen as a firm, inviolable bound-
ary of their discretion. There was, though, a notable difference in the extent
to which they saw themselves bound to follow, adapt or disregard organisa-
tional rules. I will first outline these findings in relation to the practitioners,
and then consider the local managers.

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There were two broad views amongst the practitioners—each repre-
sented by four social workers (each group comprised two from the older
persons team and two from the mental health team). Both groups discussed
their relationship to organisational rules in terms of respecting procedures
and achieving fair outcomes for service users, but with different emphases
on which these two related principles were taken as the starting point, the
default option. The first group emphasised procedural fairness and the
second group fair outcomes.
Rules were seen as being of value by the first group of practitioners
because they ensured consistency and fair treatment for service users:
‘Rules are actually there for a very good reason and it’s to promote equality.
Never, ever, ever bend the rules. Because if you do you start slipping in
terms of your own professionalism.’ Rules help limit favouritism and pref-
erential treatment: ‘I want to do the best I can for my clients. I do feel that.
But at the same time . . . I don’t feel good when . . . for some reason someone
else has got a service . . . that not . . . everyone’s. . . going to get.’
While concerned to avoid favouritism, this group still recognised a com-
mitment to individual service users, but emphasised the need to address
these needs within the policies. Practitioners pointed to two ways of achiev-
ing this. First, rules governing practice were not so prescriptive as to be in-
flexible in meeting individuals’ needs:

. . . you try and be creative. . . . it’s not ignoring the rules but it’s just advocat-
ing for your client and doing the best you can for them within boundaries . . .
perhaps putting in an extra visit and thinking, well, I’ll somehow get that
time back because I’ll just ask them to . . . do the next few visits in a bit
shorter time.

While committed to following organisational rules, they were not uncritical.

They felt a responsibility to act as advocates for change, and saw this as
central to their role in the organisation: ‘I tend to follow the rules . . . but
complain about them when I think they’re petty and irrelevant.’
However, these practitioners emphasised that a social worker ‘can’t be a
maverick . . .. There’s lots of things we can do to get a point across, but who
on earth is actually going to start trusting you? If you break the rules, you’ve
broken the trust’. Respect for rules was seen as providing an ordered work
 Organisational Rules and Discretion in Adult Social Work Page 11 of 20

place: ‘. . . we’ve all got to work together in the same way because otherwise
you’d just have chaos.’ For these practitioners, trust is multidirectional. It
relates both to service users (who need to know that their rights, embedded
in rules, will be respected) and to their employing authority (whose policies
they are employed to carry out). It is also reciprocal: senior managers in the
authority should recognise and follow the rules, and also recognise the role
of professional discretion in the application of policies in particular
situations.
In relation to the first point, this group was wary of senior managers’
‘flexibility’ in their approach to policies and procedures, such as eligibility

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criteria:
I like the idea of a level playing field. I’ve found it really quite hard when . . .
we’re carrying out assessments and trying to work towards criteria, and then
seeing that maybe somebody’s been unhappy with that and they’ve then
maybe gone through the complaints procedure and maybe contacted a
manager direct, and then . . . the rules are bent, you know.

In relation to the second point, they felt that procedures should not be so
detailed as to negate the role of professional judgement: where they iden-
tified problems with the rules, the authority should listen to their concerns.
Most of the practitioners within this group felt that this aspect of the
balance of trust—with the authority—was working, but one practitioner
noted its fragility, and found it increasingly difficult to work as a
professional:
I have to say that if things were so restrictive, so many rules which didn’t
allow for [discretion] . . . I’m not sure I could work within that system,
really . . . and maybe that’s what’s happening. I think it’s been very prescrip-
tive. You know, become much more ‘don’t do this, do that,

In contrast to this first group, the other group of practitioners approached

policies and procedures more critically, and with less of a sense of obliga-
tion to follow them. They emphasised substantive ethical commitments
over the procedural concern for equal treatment. They felt that social
workers ‘should not be judgemental to start with’, that ‘you actually have
to treat people as individuals, not just treat them all the same. And that
may mean not treating somebody equal[ly]—well, they may appear not to
be treated equally.’
These practitioners saw good practice as a commitment to employing
professional judgement, rather than just following procedures:
. . . if I can justify it to myself and it is in the client’s best interest, that’s how
I justify it . . . and deciding for myself that actually this isn’t good for this
client. I wouldn’t discuss it with anybody. It would be my own judgement.

They felt they had good reasons for bending and even breaking rules. Or-
ganisational policies and procedures, they felt, could not capture the com-
plexity of the lives and problems presented by service users:
Page 12 of 20 Tony Evans

I guess in terms of our eligibility criteria matrix, I guess there rules are
broken, in that people may have been borderline but I’ve included them
in the service because . . . issues aren’t immediate, or there are problems
that you can see that will come up in the next 6 months.

There was also a strong feeling that official policies reflected an impover-
ished conception of need, requiring enrichment by professional reinterpret-
ation. One practitioner spoke of disregarding the rules applying to a special
fund to help a client have a good bank holiday:

. . . we have a social work fund for people in greatest need, supposedly, and
I’ve managed to wangle £30 out of that for one of my clients who is going to

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have a pretty miserable Christmas, actually, and it’s just for food, for extra
nice food for her.

Another practitioner emphasised the need to ensure that service users got
their just desert:

I’ve got a lady, a wonderful lady . . . the main carer for a friend who’d fallen
and had a terrible head injury . . . they’re probably not eligible for services.
But I sort of . . . it’s re-interpreting the rules, really, to make sure they get
what they deserve. But if I strictly applied our matrix theory to them they
wouldn’t. This is the trouble when you ever have any categories of need
. . . it is bending the rules rather than breaking the rules, isn’t it?

These practitioners believed that, having been recruited as professionals,

they were employed to use their discretion:

Obviously you’ve got to have rules. But they’re paying you to do a job, and
I’m quite happy if they leave me to get on with it and do it how I think I can
best do it. . . . I can’t remember when I last had to do something I didn’t
agree with. Because I usually find a way round . . . not doing it, or doing it
a different way that makes it acceptable to me.

In the preceding accounts, practitioners have described bending, breaking

and challenging organisational rules; but these practitioners work within
organisations in which their actions are monitored and managed. In this
context, discretion must be understood not only as individual practice,
but also in terms of the relationship between practitioners and their man-
agers. This applies particularly in bureaucracies where practitioners tend
to be line-managed by fellow professionals, influenced to a lesser or
greater extent by a similar commitment (Freidson, 1994). In this study,
managers and practitioners shared the view that work pressure, rationing
and cost-cutting severely curtailed practitioners’ ability to practise in line
with their professional values. In the words of a local manager:
. . . there are more and more expectations of the service provided, but [they]
will not have an equivalency of funding to match those expectations. So you
feel that the treadmill’s speeding up and you’re getting tired, and it some-
times feels difficult to complete the circle.
 Organisational Rules and Discretion in Adult Social Work Page 13 of 20

All four managers saw consistency in applying rules as important, but

balanced this against an equally important recognition of service users’
complex individual circumstances. Rules often had to be applied flexibly:
. . . it sounds like common sense [to apply the rules equally to everyone], but
in reality we do bend the rules to those in greatest need, and I think because
individual circumstances never entirely fit into rules all the time.

The main emphasis seemed to be on rule-bending in the interest of the

service user, achieving the spirit, if not the letter, of policy:
. . . saying ‘Mrs Smith doesn’t quite meet the criteria for getting this re-

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source, but if you actually have a look at all this information you may
wish to think that she should be getting the resource’—OK. You’d bend
the rules there.

However, beyond this agreement about the need for some flexibility in ap-
plying rules, there were two different starting positions amongst these man-
agers about the degree of that flexibility.
For two of the four managers, bending rules was necessary ‘to make the
system work . . . [but where] you think a rule is very unfair, often you can’t
break it’. This was a practical argument, which also emphasised practical
limitations on flexibility:
There are some rules you can’t break. You can’t produce more money for
someone going into care.

. . . You might disagree that somebody has to pay . . .. That is a totally unfair
rule, but I can’t break them. I can’t. I’m not in a position to break them.

They were also concerned that flexibility should not slide into chaos:
If you break the rule on something then why can’t you break the law on
everything? If you think that rule’s unfair, well, couldn’t every rule be
unfair? If we take it from that, then we’re all going to operate without
any guidance on precisely what we want to do.

The other two managers took a different view. They described an ‘instinct’
to break rules ‘to sort things out certainly for those in greatest need as
quickly as possible, and sort of blow the procedures’. But they also talked
of experience teaching them to temper this approach. Both discussed
getting ‘found out’ and learning to be careful:
I’m not stupid—I have learned if you do break the rules you don’t half get
punished, and the clients get punished as a result . . .. You bang your head
against the door so many times; if it’s not going to work, well, it’s not
going to work. So that’s it.

The lesson they had learnt was to develop a sense of which rules to follow:
I have noticed over the years that certain memos come round: you must do
such-and-such. And in fact you even get government directives: you must do
such-and-such. But it never actually happens. You need to sort of pick out
Page 14 of 20 Tony Evans

which ones they are serious about, to a certain degree, and which ones
they’re not.

Professional social workers, managers and practitioners disagreed on the

degree to which they emphasised rules and freedom in practice. Interes-
tingly, there was no clear relationship between the two different manage-
ment stances outlined above and the two different approaches towards
rules and discretion amongst practitioners discussed earlier. Some of the
practitioners who emphasised the value of rules, for instance, were super-
vised by a manager who talked about having an instinct to break rules,
and this manager also supervised practitioners whose instinct was to bend

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rules.

Discussion

The social workers in this study saw themselves as bound to follow the law
but disagreed about how they should respond to organisational rules.
The study identified two broad groups of social workers, made up of both
practitioners and local managers, each group tending to favour one of the
different approaches identified by Oakeshott (1975, 1983). One approach
emphasises the importance of rules, their inherent authority and clarity,
which reduces (but does not eliminate) the need for discretion. The other
focuses on rules as a means to an end, whose authority lies in their compli-
ance with the desired goal, requiring wide-ranging discretion in the use of
organisational rules.
The idea that some workers follow rules and others break them is often
associated with the roles that are played by these workers within the organ-
isation. An influential way of seeing the conflict between these two
approaches to organisational rules has been to locate them in different or-
ganisational strata: managers, for instance, as rule-followers and enforcers
who seek to reduce discretion and practitioners as rule-challengers who
seek to expand discretion (e.g. Lipsky, 2010). The relationship between atti-
tudes to rules and the organisational role, though, is not straightforward. In
this study, it was not the case that different perspectives were correlated
with different organisational strata. Each group was made up of both prac-
titioners and their managers. Furthermore, there was no obvious relation-
ship between organisational location in terms of team membership and
attitude to rules. These attitudes cut across teams: local managers who sub-
scribed to a more discretionary mindset, for instance, managed some prac-
titioners who emphasised the value of rule-following.
An approach to understanding the attitudes of professional groups to or-
ganisational rules is to locate these attitudes in a culture arising from pro-
fessional socialisation. There is a literature that associates different
professions with different attitudes to rule-following and discretion.
Nursing is often portrayed as a compliant, rule-following profession, in
 Organisational Rules and Discretion in Adult Social Work Page 15 of 20

contrast to medicine, which embraces discretion (McDonald et al., 2005).

Such sweeping characterisations of a profession’s mindset are problematic:
some social workers in the study emphasised the importance of compliance;
others showed a more relaxed attitude. Both groups related these perspec-
tives to professionalism. It seems unlikely that social work is the only pro-
fession to display such diversity. Another version of this approach is to
associate attitude with cohort experience or with degree of experience in
practice. Recently trained practitioners have experience of working in a
context of audit and surveillance (Munro, 2004) and may be more likely
to accept the authority of organisational rules because this is their only ex-

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perience as practitioners. Alternatively, willingness to bend or break organ-
isational rules may come with growing confidence and experience in
practice; newly qualified practitioners, for instance, may be more likely to
follow rules than their experienced colleagues (e.g. Banks, 2004).
However, in this study, there was no clear association between length of
period qualified and attitude to organisational rules. Both groups were
made up of both relatively recently and longer qualified practitioners. In
the first group, whose members emphasised the need to follow rules, the
period of qualification of practitioners ranged from 5.5 years to just
under twenty years. The second group, emphasising a more laissez-faire at-
titude to organisational rules, included the two most recently qualified prac-
titioners (2.5 and 4.5 years, respectively) and the longest qualified staff
member (twenty-three years).
Another dimension that may be relevant to understanding attitudes to or-
ganisational rules is gender. There is an argument that there are different
ethical voices associated with gender: men with an ethic of justice, which
is committed to equality and detachment, and women with an ethic of
care, espousing attention and response to the individual (Gilligan, 1982).
The views put forward by those interviewees who value rules such as the im-
portance of ‘a level playing field’ in the provision of services echoes the
‘masculine’ ethic of justice position, while the commitment to bend rules
reflects the commitment the ethic of care Gillian associated with women.
This study found an equal spread of the two perspectives amongst
women and men, reflecting arguments that question the equation of par-
ticular ethical perspectives with particular genders (Thorne, 2002; Banks,
2004).
In analysing these findings, it is valuable to consider the participants’ own
accounts of why a particular approach to organisational rules is important
to them. This requires us to put aside the assumption in some of the litera-
ture on discretion in adult social work that discretion is a good thing, that
following organisational rules is not and that compliance with organisation-
al rules entails uncritical submission to managerial values (e.g. Carey, 2008).
The social workers whose preference was to follow rules and distrust exten-
sive discretion related their attitudes to a commitment to impartiality. It
may be that they also agreed with the content of the policy—although
Page 16 of 20 Tony Evans

the original case study suggests that this is not necessarily the case (Evans,
2010). But their views should not simply be dismissed as ideologically deter-
mined (Carey, 2008); people’s own ‘meanings deserve our respect’ (Thomp-
son, 1991, p. 351) and need to be incorporated into any analysis of their
approaches to organisational rules and discretion. It may be that these prac-
titioners sought to act ethically in their official role, reflecting Du Gay’s
idea of a public service ethic (Du Gay, 2000): that of striving to reduce
and control personal bias and commitment in the exercise of official
duties. Certainly, within this group, rules entailed, for them, a general
duty reflecting a wide sense of responsibility to potential, as well as

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current service users. In this study, this distinction between organisational
role and attitudes to rules was not borne out; practitioners and local man-
agers in both teams expressed different attitudes to organisational rules.
For the other group, the moral imperative was expressed in terms of the
best interests of service users. This principle is perhaps a central commit-
ment of professionalism: the idea of the altruistic, committed person who
does not compromise a principle to ‘the other’ (Bauman, 2000). There is,
though, potentially another side to this commitment: the sense of profes-
sional patronage and power—the risk of falling into the pattern of ‘the de-
serving’ and ‘the undeserving’. The danger is that, in the process of
determining somebody’s best interests on their behalf, the service user is
disempowered and demeaned. Soss (2000) makes this point in a study com-
paring service users’ experiences in rights (rule)-based welfare services and
discretion-based welfare:

A subject standing before a benevolent monarch can recognise with a sigh

of relief that king is kind yet still despise the inequality of power. Likewise, a
client who senses that her worker controls her fate and has access to her
private life is all the more grateful if this worker appears to be caring and
sympathetic (Soss, 2000, p. 123).

Oakeshott argues that, while the two approaches to rules which he identifies
are analytically distinct, they actually operate and interact in tension. Certain-
ly, in this study, while participants favoured particular approaches to rules and
discretion, these views were not held exclusively; people were confronted
with everyday experiences in their practice, which brought out tensions in
their position. Members of both groups were engaged with the arguments
of the other perspective. This is not to say that they were moving towards
a common, homogenised position. Rather, they gave different weight and
emphasis to these approaches. For the group expressing a commitment to
formal rules, there were circumstances in which rules should be applied
more flexibly. But they presented this flexibility as a shift from their
normal practice. In their commitment to rules, they also felt that they
were not stifling, and allowed for some room for professional judgement.
Similarly, in the second group, while the initial response was an emphasis
on discretion and to disregard organisational rules, there was also
 Organisational Rules and Discretion in Adult Social Work Page 17 of 20

a recognition that ‘you’ve got to have rules’ and that their practice needed
to be aware of the potential that organisational rules could be enforced. In
both cases, these caveats and shifts reflect a mixture of principled and prag-
matic reasons, including the need to make policy work in practice, and the
sanctions associated with breaking some rules. This ongoing professional
process echoes a dynamic central within professional ethics, in the idea
that practitioners often have to hold conflicting perspectives in tension
(Banks, 2004).

Conclusion

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A small-scale study such as this is not intended to be a representative
sample of the attitudes of professional social workers in adult social ser-
vices. Accordingly, it is important to acknowledge this and to foreground
the rationale for the study, which is that it seeks to offer a useful and enligh-
tening perspective on practitioners’ attitudes to the formal rules that are
part of the environment of practice. These observations offer tentative
insights that can contribute to our understanding of a situation, but they
are also ‘approximate and provisional, and relative to the vagaries of ex-
perience’ (Dey, 2004, p. 87).
The findings considered above suggest that Oakeshott’s (1975, 1983) por-
trayal of a dynamic tension in approaches to formal rules is a fruitful per-
spective, requiring further research. Attitudes to rules in the two groups
were not simply the result of people’s organisational or social location;
they had their own ideas about how they should approach organisational
rules and the role of discretion. These ideas were not static; they also
reflected a pragmatic element. Questions about how different attitudes to
organisational rules relate to each other and in what circumstances
suggest a developing research agenda for the further examination of profes-
sional discretion.
These moves also reflect struggles in understanding the contemporary
role of professionalism in the personalised welfare state. For those in the
group that favoured following formal rules, this reflected a professional
commitment to fairness and service users’ rights. This echoes the ideas of
‘design for democracy’ literature, represented by Soss (2000). For the
other group, being able to adapt, break and bend the rules was a reflection
of professionalism, demonstrating commitment to particular service users’
needs and reflecting a traditional idea of the role of professionals in the
welfare state—to tailor-make services.
This study highlights tension in the idea of professionalism within organi-
sations providing welfare services. It suggests a need to look beyond the
notion of discretion, in the sense of freedom to act, as an evidently good at-
tribute of practice. Practitioners’ attitudes to organisational rules and their
evaluation of the rules that structure their practice are important. People
Page 18 of 20 Tony Evans

have reasons for exercising discretion that should be evaluated in the par-
ticular circumstances of its use. Similarly, valuing formal rules is not neces-
sarily unprofessional; it can reflect a commitment to consistency,
accountability and transparency in practice, reflecting an idea of service
users’ rights (Banks, 2004). Neither rule-following nor an emphasis on the
discretionary arena is, in isolation, a valuable area for further exploration
of professionalism. Rather, following Oakeshott’s analysis, the challenge
lies in acknowledging the tension between these two aspects of professional
work, and in understanding the different ways in which professionals ap-
proach and negotiate the space between them in particular organisational

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contexts.

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