Navigating the anti-relational force: ambivalence and performance management in a child and family social work department

During the 1980’s, the two dichotomous worlds of accountancy and social welfare came crashing together in the form of performance management (PM). This central feature of New Public Management (NPM) is now utilised as both a way to measure and prescribe a process to UK child and family social work. This study utilises a psychosocial approach to explore how six social workers and two managers in an English Local Authority child and family social work department experience PM. The study is heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory, alongside trauma and complexity theory, and is methodologically informed by free association narrative interviewing techniques and data analysis, as well as reflexive thematic analysis. As such, both conscious and unconscious process occurring within individual and organisational experiences are explored within the data. The study finds that ambivalence is a central organising concept to understand both social workers’ and managers’ experience of PM. Ambivalence is experienced in multiple different forms both individually and within the group experience and this constitutes layers of ambivalence that are embedded within the functioning of the organisation. Six layers of ambivalence are identified within the data which are critically and theoretically analysed to develop an understanding of participants’ experience of PM. This thesis contributes to knowledge in several ways. Firstly, in establishing the role of ambivalence in experiences of PM, both from an individual and organisational position. Secondly, by providing an understanding of how the relatively new phenomenon of sharing performance data with frontline social workers is experienced, both from the position of those sending and those receiving this. Thirdly, through pluralist application of psychoanalytic, trauma and complexity theory, new findings into how PM is functioning organisationally in child and family social work are established.