‘Rogue’ Social Workers: The Problem with Rules for Ethical Behaviour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores one aspect of increased managerialism, the impact of the expansion of rules in organizations. Discussing findings from a recent large-scale Canadian research project with social workers, this paper addresses some of the effects of the proliferation of rules, including their ethical implications, and considers the usefulness of different theoretical accounts of the rule-bending individual. The research indicated that although rules did serve as technologies to regulate and normalize practitioners’ behaviours, they were not monolithic in their consequences. Typologies which divided individuals in terms of their responses to rules were useful but insufficient explanations of the observed effects. The paper suggests that practitioners will use discretion to deal with the complexity of situations, the contradictory nature of the rules, and to resist being positioned as subjects in ways they found problematic, outcomes which support Lipsky’s classic premises. Other findings were that the increase of rules, through their complexity and contradiction, promoted ‘rogue’ or rule-bending behaviour. A further outcome was that practitioners who perceived part of their responsibility to be change agents towards societal transformation encountered particular difficulties, because the expansion of rules impacted negatively on the availability of their time and energy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".