Mellan marknad och profession: en studie av socionomkonsulter och deras professionella ideologi

Abstract

The social services in Sweden have faced recruitment challenges for decades. Since the 2010s, this problem has commonly been solved by hiring consultants from private companies. The emergence and continued existence of social work consultants is hard to explain. It is a professional group that despite extensive and incessant criticism has managed to survive and even grow. The aim of this thesis is to explain how and why consultants have emerged and become an increasingly common feature within the social services in Sweden. The study has a twofold purpose. Firstly, it aims to trace the roots and development of social work consultants and explain how and why today’s historical and political context has served as a fertile ground for their establishment. Secondly, the study aims to explain and understand why social workers choose to become consultants. To trace the history of consultants and to provide a historical contextualization, four different empirical sources have been used. The sources used include media reports on the use of consultants in social services, political and union debates about consultants, relevant legal sources and various types of statistical surveys. To answer why social workers become social work consultants, quali- tative interviews were conducted with active consultants and their managers. Theoretically the study draws on Bucher and Strauss’s theory of internal segmentation within professions, which argues that professions are continuously undergoing profession-driven processes that lead to the creation of new subgroups. According to their theory, this type of process can be analysed similarly to the emergence of ideologically driven social movements. The study reveals that the history of consultants dates back to the late 1990s. The historical analysis identifies three events that have been crucial for consultants: the legalization of private staffing agencies in the 1990s, the debate on the legality of consultants in the 2000s and the acute staff shortages within the social services in the 2010s. The study also shows that social workers’ decisions to become consultants must be understood in relation to a group-specific professional ideology. Consultants use this ideology to explain and justify the group’s existence, their career choice and why they choose to forgo traditional public employment within the social services. According to the ideology, it is the political governance and personnel policies within the social services that create the demand for consultants. An increasing number of social workers refuse to accept the prevailing conditions within the social services and choose to end their employment. This mass exodus has served as a breeding ground for the consulting industry and made social services dependent on consultants. The ideology justifies the existence and use of consultants with three different arguments. Firstly, social services would be unable to fulfil their statutory mission without consultants. Secondly, the consulting industry is essential to slow down the exodus from social services; without the industry, more social workers would have left the professional field completely, leaving social services with even fewer social workers. Thirdly, by exposing social services as an employer to competition, the industry helps improve conditions within social services. Thus, the industry is seen as an actor that benefits not only social workers who choose to become consultants but also social workers in general.