New Management in Human Services

2nd Edition

Management is one of the most rapidly changing human sciences. How organizations are managed has a dramatic impact on their effectiveness, whatever their mission. Whether they are businesses providing adequate products to the marketplace while earning a profit for their owners or health and social welfare agencies committed to maintaining the well-being of vulnerable people, the achievements and failures of organizations affect the lives of everyone.

Managing human services organizations is not easy. It is often true that organizational managers are neither as satisfied with their jobs nor as well compensated for their work as employees in other sectors. And management is always an imperfect process. There are so many things that can go wrong for organizations, internally and externally, that even the best management may succeed only partially.

Management and managers are often under attack. It has been popular to criticize bureaucrats, usually defined as employees of large government organizations. It is rare for anyone to defend these people as performing important tasks that help others with the essentials of their lives. When the term bureaucracy is broadly defined, it can probably be applied to most of the people, including human services workers, who are employed by social services agencies. Those who direct and provide supervision in human services organizations are probably among the most dedicated of all workers in the United States, although they are often undervalued. The editors and authors of this book acknowledge their value and offer suggestions and commentaries in the following chapters to help them improve their performance. Many of the authors and both of the editors have been or are managers in human services organizations. Therefore, the contents of this book reflect real experiences in the world of management as well as a positive attitude about those who are engaged in that important work.

Many of the concepts reported here are taken from classic as well as contemporary management theory. It is reassuring, as several of the chapters make clear, that many of the most pervasive, newer management concepts are based on and follow from much earlier ideas about managing. New approaches and new theories of management are developed almost daily. However, most of them are solidly rooted in the classic ideas that also inform this book.

The first edition of New Management in Human Services was published in 1988. We recognized that management had been, for several years, the most important and, in many ways, most neglected topic in the human services. We had, from the perspective of teachers of social work management and of managers in large social welfare agencies, frequently heard that social work schools were not effective in preparing practitioners for the jobs most graduates eventually assumed as supervisors or directors. For these graduates management skills are even more crucial than the clinical and service skills so central to social work education. We also recognized that the social work articles on management frequently seemed to lag behind other management literature; social workers were teaching concepts that business and public administration had rejected years earlier as almost mythological. We wanted to bring the newer theories into the social work management literature—especially the lessons from Japanese management and from the "excellence" concepts of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman.

By the 1990s, even the "new" management we espoused began to look old. There had been much newer theories of management developed and explicated, although the works of Peters and Waterman and the Japanese lessons continued to be central to modern approaches to organizations and are included and emphasized in this second edition. However, many concerns that had been important in the first edition were no longer as central as they once were. New ideas that should be included in any discussion of new management approaches had not yet been developed or had not been emphasized in the first edition. And the practical issues of management had also changed. There has been a near revolution in organizational structures from "tall" structures with multiple layers of management and supervision to "flat" organizations and team management in which fewer people supervise more workers and in which the middle levels have been reduced or eliminated. Technology that includes personal computers, electronic mail, the Internet, pagers, and cellular telephones has changed the ways managers and workers perform their tasks in all sorts of organizations but, perhaps, most dramatically in the human services. Traditional concepts, that once seemed unlikely to ever change, such as "offices" and "working hours," now often seemed superfluous. Human services workers could and often do perform their responsibilities with only rare visits to their offices and diverse locales. Meanwhile, the nature and composition of the workforce became much more diverse, including many more women and people of color as managers. The growing diversity of the population was reflected in the growing diversity of the employment patterns in all organizations, especially those in the human services organizations. More people of various ethnicities and physical abilities were engaged in the work of human services organizations. Management was different and new again, perhaps more so than when the first edition was prepared.

Therefore, we proposed to the NASW Press that a second edition was needed. They agreed, and this volume is that new version of New Management in Human Services. Little other than the title is the same in this edition. Two chapters of continued value and relevence, by Joseph Bevilacqua and Felice Davidson Perlmutter, are all that are republished from the first edition. A few chapters have been updated and revised, but most are on new subjects and written by new authors. There are more women authors and an emphasis on organizational diversity, as well as attention to forms and techniques of management developed in the 1990s. Total quality management, which has become one of the most important and influential management ideas of the current era, is covered in several chapters, in addition to some of the more pervasive management concepts.

We think the book will be useful to human services managers and to students of human services management. Management content is now a requirement for social work students at both the baccalaureate and master's-degree levels, and we hope this book will help faculty and students learn more about new management concepts. We also hope that the other human services fields—counseling, nursing and other health care fields, education, psychology, public administration, rehabilitation, and others—will find this work useful in their own educational activities. We use this content in continuing human services management, and we believe others will find it helpful for such teaching.

Our thanks go to the authors of the chapters for their scholarship, dedication, and cooperation. Their efforts are the primary substance of this work. At the University of South Carolina College of Social Work, support staff member Joyce Shaw has been instrumental in manuscript preparation. Graduate assistants Kevin Colligan and Jeanne M. King also helped organize and process the manuscript. The National Network for Social Work Managers was instrumental in setting priorities for new management areas that needed major emphasis. NASW Press editor Marcia Roman was project manager and has done excellent work. Director of Editorial Services Nancy A. Winchester reviewed the final draft of the book and made several suggestions that improved it. As with the first edition, NASW Associate Executive Director for Communications Linda Beebe has been enormously helpful with every element of the book—from the original conceptualization to all of the details of content, format, and design. We are indebted to her for her attention and her peerless publishing skills.