Tackling the effects of neoliberalism? Integrating services at Barnardos New Zealand.

• Author: Levine, Hal B.
• Position: Report

Abstract

Like most voluntary organisations, Barnardos New Zealand has faced a number of challenges as a result of changes in the way the Government funds social services. It found itself in economic difficulties as it scrambled for contracts and faced real doubts that the organisation would be able to sustain its founding mission of providing welfare services for children in New Zealand. Led by a new chief executive (CEO), Barnardos began an ambitious programme of renewal by integrating services. Seen as a way of countering fragmentation, service integration has a long history but an ambiguous record of success in bringing about its desired ends. This paper, based on interviewing and focus groups, looks at integrated services from the perspective of staff at Barnardos New Zealand. It reports their views on whether this particular restructuring exercise is something worth doing, how it is happening and how to advance it further. The article uses Bourdieu's critique of neoliberalism to put some of the doubts and expectations regarding integrated services here into a wider context. Uncertainties notwithstanding, service integration still has considerable appeal.

BACKGROUND

New Zealand ... has gone the furthest toward a contract state model and it is here where the transformation of third sector voluntary organisations into agents of the state is no longer simply a theoretical issue. The New Zealand Department of Social Welfare has: reduced its direct role in service delivery, increased its use of voluntary agencies, and altered its existing relationship with the voluntary sector by abandoning a grant model of funding and adopting a contract model. This has led to a more accountable system and more delivery at the community level, but has been criticized for the burdensome nature of the accountability regime and the failure to adequately protect and nurture the unique qualities of voluntary agencies. (Evans and Shields 2006, citing Canada West Foundation)

Barnardos New Zealand is one of those voluntary agencies whose unique qualities have changed. In fact they changed to such an extent during the advance of the "contract state" that the organisation began to falter. Informants told me that it was losing both money and its sense of purpose when the founding CEO retired.

Describing itself as the country's leading welfare agency for children and families, Barnardos was established in New Zealand in 1972. By that stage the parent organisation in Britain had provided homes for destitute children for over a hundred years, and set up branches in Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand when poor British children were sent overseas. Barnardos New Zealand runs a raft of programmes locally, including family counselling, support, homes, a parent helpline, social workers in schools, a supervised contact service, treatment centres for adolescents involved with sexual abuse, after-school care programmes, home-based child care and creches. Its $40 million expenditure is funded by fees for some services, public donation, and contracts from the Ministry of Education and Child Youth and Family (Barnardos New Zealand 2008). With a new CEO appointed in 2003, Barnardos began to reconfigure itself, embarking on a programme of planned renewal in 2006. The first goal listed in the organisation's change document (Barnardos New Zealand 2006) is to "Develop and implement an integration plan for all Barnardos services".

The idea that a coordinated approach to clients of welfare and service organisations would serve them better than a series of disconnected programmes has a long history. It became a central facet of Lyndon Johnson's great society initiative in the 1970s. As plausible as the idea sounds, it was never evaluated adequately or shown to have benefits for clients. (1) Despite this lack of evidence that service integration has any real value, it reappeared as a central issue in policy debates in the 1990s because it seemed so necessary to control the fragmentation caused by privatising and contracting social services (Milward 1995).

This paper looks into the programme of planned change by means of integrating services at Barnardos New Zealand. It focuses especially on how service integration is seen by staff in the context of recent changes in internal and external conditions. What is particularly interesting is that some staff say integrating services is a fundamental change, designed to bring Barnardos back to its roots as a cohesive child-centred charitable organisation, while others are more sceptical and view it as a management tool to better cope in the new environment. Indeed, there is room for doubt over what service integration is designed to accomplish.

Bourdieu says that people involved in administering and delivering social services experience the contradictions of neoliberalism most directly. "The left hand of the state", those who spend money on hard-won social programmes, is opposed to, and by, the technocrats of finance ministries and banks, comprising the state's "right-hand". Sent to the front to repair the damage of market-led policy, he asks how the constituents of this weak side could "not have the sense of being constantly undermined or betrayed?" (1998b:3). Subject to restructuring, line management, performance appraisals, contracts, audits, competition- the full panoply of mechanisms designed to make alternatives to its "reforms" impossible - how could Barnardos cope with neoliberalism? This paper argues that despite the reasonable doubts held by some staff, and by scholars who have examined service integration more generally, it constitutes a real attempt by Barnardos New Zealand to survive neoliberalism by tackling the forces that undermine the coherence, internal solidarity and mission of the organisation.

RESEARCH AT BARNARDOS NEW ZEALAND

People working for Barnardos have a vision of what the organisation stands for, what it does and how it should work. They obtain that vision from a variety of sources - personal, professional and organisational. The research this paper draws upon consists of interviews with a variety of Barnardos staff who articulated their thoughts on organisational development and change to me, and attendance at organisational meetings at Taita House and a management "road show" about integrated services in Wellington. A reference group of interested management staff in Wellington oversaw the research. We met regularly over the course of the project (almost two years) to evaluate results and plan future directions. Barnardos staff were uniformly supportive and helpful at all phases of this research.

I interviewed 17 people for about an hour each at Barnardos offices in Wellington, Lower Hutt, Auckland, Manukau and Hamilton, and conducted two-hour focus group sessions in Wellington, Porirua, Lower Hutt, Manukau and Palmerston North, with five or six staff in each group. These loosely structured interviews and focus group discussions explored perspectives on Barnardos's direction and its current situation. We also talked about whether staff perceived the need for this change to be genuine, or saw it as imposed by senior management from Barnardos head office in Wellington. In the course of these discussions a picture emerged of a group of people who were united by their commitment to children but simultaneously divided by professional allegiances, organisational dynamics, and the requirements of government funding and auditing of their programmes.

In addition to these activities with Barnardos staff, I interviewed two clients (fewer than hoped) and two Ministry officials recommended by Murray Edridge, Barnardos's CEO. I also visited a number of early childhood centres, where I talked to staff, and a home for adolescent sexual offenders.

Although my sample was not representative, it did...