Managing Fragmentation: A case study of an area child protection committee in a time of change.

  • Adrian Barton

    Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

    Abstract

    One of the outstanding features of capitalist society is its fluidity. What is the orthodoxy today stands a very good chance of being supplanted by a new orthodoxy tomorrow. Similarly, today's problems have every chance of being tomorrow's solutions. Accordingly, individuals and organisations are often faced with situations, contexts and environments which are new and challenging and contain the potential to disrupt existing control structures.

    Essentially, this contention is at the heart of this piece of work. The following pages will describe and discuss the impact that a 'new orthodoxy' has had on an existing organisational arrangement. Specifically, the work focuses on the child protection system of England and Wales to examine the effect that New Public Management, and its accompanying tendency to fragment organisations into managerialised purchaser or provider units, has had on the established organisational discourse of partnership working. It argues that the central features of managerialism - core tasks, ownership, audit and ideology - run counter to those features required to facilitate partnerships co-operation, sharing and resources exchange. Moreover, it suggests that the inherent mis-match between these two prominent organisational discourses is acting as a barrier to the effective implementation of either.
    Date of AwardFeb 2000
    Original languageEnglish

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