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...