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'.