Boundary work: Costing and caring in the social services

Abstract

“Where does it stop on costs?”—this paper offers some responses to this question on the appropriate boundaries for costing expertise. The question was posed by a contracts officer within a social services department. The context for the question was an empirical research study in which front line welfare professionals were asked to comment, first, on costing information which could, possibly, assist in making “value for money” assessments and, second, on the contracting regime within which such costing information assumes a potentially highlighted significance. At the first stage of the study welfare professionals were found to be engaged in boundary-work to prevent the encroachment of costs on care activities. “Costing” and “caring” were being managed as “disengaged domains” through the boundary work of obfuscation, “reality-defining” and marginalization. Consequent upon the initial study the social services departments were re-visited two years later. By this time it was apparent that boundary-work had allowed some engagement between costing and caring. The paper argues that processes of alignment between costing and caring and the reconstitution of organizational tasks (including the creation of care “managers”) have allowed social work professionals to accept some costing work—work which had previously been defined as “the other”. The major themes of this paper are: the exploration of the responses of operational social services personnel to their new financial roles, and the interpretation of change in the social services context through the ideas of boundary-work. These themes are developed through a consideration of the ambiguous tasks of welfare-professionals and the consequent indeterminacy of resourcing decisions. The paper concludes that the limits of applicability of costing are yet to be set in the domain of the social services.