What is it about?
Social work is about social justice. However the systems of social care, which emerged from an era of eugenics, institutionalisation and social control, don't provide the best basis for achieving true social justice. Disabled people, and others, have been demonstrating that social justice is about living a life of full citizenship. Recent social policy reforms, which go under the rather misleading name of 'personalisation' are bets understood as efforts to reform social care systems to achieve citizenship for all.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
This article offers a way of connecting the ambiguous concept of personalisation with the practical efforts to reform social care and the model of citizenship which was developed by Duffy in his Keys to Citizenship.
Perspectives
My own work is closely associated with the concept of personalisation, after I developed a series of interconnected social innovations to promote social justice in social care (e.g. personal budgets, self-directed support, individual service funds, and the seven steps of self-directed support). Eventually my efforts came into conflict with the perspective of central government and this article was my first effort in an academic journal to offer my own sense of what these ideas were really meant to be about.
Dr Simon John Duffy
The Centre for Welfare Reform
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Citizenship Theory of social justice: exploring the meaning of personalisation for social workers, Journal of Social Work Practice, September 2010, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/02650533.2010.500118.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
