ICTs and Professional Autonomy

The advance of ICTs in the human services has generated many concerns, including a proposition that professional autonomy is necessarily compromised. Database systems, and the associated managerialist scrutiny, enable a ¿dehumanising¿ intrusion into the worker/client relations that constitute social casework. ICTs and Professional Autonomy responds to this concern by tracing the historically developed shift from the rituals of self-reflection attached to process recording through to the risk management calculations associated with desktop recording. Dearman¿s conclusion, based on a post-structuralist analytics of power and knowledge, is that autonomy is not simply a matter of principled freedom from managerial power but rather a disposition to act, which in turn is an outcome of different forms of engagement with changing techniques of representation. As recording practices have shifted, from a profound reliance on process and self-reflection to an abbreviated keying of ¿relevant information¿, so too has the nature of real relations between professional labour and management, and so too has the capacity of professional social workers for ¿self-mastery¿.

Philip Dearman teaches Communications and Writing in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, Australia. He researches the histories of communications technologies, with a particular focus on the (re)negotiation of relations of power in the workplace.