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Care management as a strategy for organising and coordinating services at the level of the individual user has to concentrate on the minutiae of interactions between helper and helped. In this, interviewing and counselling play a pivotal role, but before we consider these in some detail we need to look at other processes involved in care management, especially in the development and provision of the care plan or package of care. These include advocacy and user-involvement both of which require new approaches which build on established social work values. Additionally, the capacity to negotiate, with agencies, organisations and individual users and carers, is essential to ensure that appropriate services are made available. Some of the necessary skills and strategies for commissioning services are similar to those employed in community work and community social work outlined in Chapter 11. While it might seem strange to separate skills in community care from community work, to do so highlights that the policies of community care do not necessarily depend upon understandings of community work. It could be argued that notions of working with communities, of empowering individuals and groups, runs counter to the philosophy of community care which focuses on individuals with need, and recommends that these needs are met by individualised packages of care.

Task-centred practice, also known as brief therapy, short-term or contract work has had a significant impact on both social work practice and the organisation of services. As the various names suggest, it is focused work which is time-limited and offers approaches to problem-solving which take into account the needs of individuals to bring about change in their situations, and the requirements of agencies that work is targeted and effective. As we will see in the account of the development of the method, its introduction challenged some of the principles of casework. In doing this it recognised that the person with the problems also had the means to resolve them, and that social work intervention should become more of a partnership. In this way task-centred casework can be seen to be at the beginning of attempts to empower users of social work services. It offers an optimistic approach which moves the focus away from the person as the problem, to practical and positive ways of dealing with difficult situations.

The previous two chapters have concentrated on the processes of care management, and in doing so have sought to identify the practices which are incorporated into those processes. We have frequently identified that, while care management might reflect a new policy approach and involve a new social work discourse, many of the processes involve practices which have been core to social work for some decades. Those practices draw upon sets of skills which are basic to the approaches outlined in the following chapters of this book, namely communication skills. Communication occurs in many ways in social work and in this chapter we focus on interviewing and counselling as two aspects of communication which are common to many social work interactions.

This chapter outlines why it is useful for social workers at all levels to know something of the discipline called management. The assertion made in the introduction that all social workers are managers will be explained and the development of the role of care manager traced. Finally, the issue of whether or not managers should have a background in social work is analysed. (It might be useful for readers to be thinking as they read the material how the agencies in which they work or are on placement operate and in what ways this affects the tasks they undertake.)

In this chapter I shall examine three of the best known approaches to the structure of organisations and the ways in which these shape people’s behaviour: these theories of organisation and management are the classical theories which came to be known as scientific management, the human relations school of management and finally systems theories. These three represent chronologically the major stages in the development of theory, and as you may find it interesting to identify the main thinkers associated with each school of thought this is the method I have chosen by which to present the material. The chapter goes on to imagine what the future of organisational designs might be and illustrates with a case study how changing the structure can affect the service given as well as job satisfaction for the staff.