Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social work is characterised by uncertainty and ambiguity, social workers are mandated to intervene in the lives of families, requiring them to make morally charged, complex decisions with and for families. The field is beset by high workloads, time pressure, negative media attention, and cost-containment measures. In recent years, acknowledgement of the complexities of social work and the challenges faced by professionals has grown, prompting attempts to reorganise the field through frequent reforms, and to reduce uncertainty of practice through standards and accountability measures. Concurrently, there is a greater recognition of the importance of professional judgement, and the need for reflexive practice that engages different knowledges, to allow for more tailored care. The Dutch social care system is currently facing a crisis, and the government has implemented temporary programs to redesign standards and practices. These experimental spaces are the main research site of this thesis, which aims to explore how Dutch social care actors navigate the friction between reforms, standards, accountability, and professional autonomy in highly charged moral settings in social care. This thesis aims to explore how Dutch social care actors navigate the friction between reforms, standards, accountability, and professional autonomy in highly charged moral settings in social care. The research for this thesis was conducted in three studies in the Netherlands: a study on the use of intuition by youth care professionals and two action research studies focused on reform, discretionary space and accountability in social care and child protection. Ultimately, I argue that we need to treat the system similarly to families in need: when professionals look at families, they are expected to look at them as a complex network with a history, with values, different roles and complexities. Families are not expected to get it right immediately, but can work in incremental changes together with those in their network and care providers. However, when there is a crisis or the need for sudden, larger changes, there is space and authority to make these decisions. There is a collective responsibility, reflection and shared decision-making towards the shared aims. This means that the social care system requires engagement in continuous incremental, collective, reparative work that explores alternative notions of success and failure, and in line with that to reconsider underlying values and notions of accountability and governance, to build a system that fosters a space in which vulnerable families, professionals, managers and administrators can be supported.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.031 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".