ABSTRACT

Bureaucratic settings pose particularly daunting problems for social workers trying to flourish as professionals, among others because the practice circumstances can be adverse. Flourishing in an Aristotelian sense requires that social workers act with skill to fulfil the goals of responsiveness (honesty and openness), fairness (justice) and compassion towards clients, as well as efficiency for the bureaucracy. Responding to the ethnographic work of Bernardo Zacka, we will outline the particular kinds of tensions these goals pose for social workers in bureaucratic settings and then will provide some proposals for mitigating these tensions. We disagree with Zacka that virtues are largely irrelevant to social workers trying to respond ethically to bureaucratic demands, but rather will propose that his ‘mechanisms of the self’ and others that we have developed in our work with students and practitioners, can strengthen social work virtues, enable social workers to flourish and foster a critical examination of one's organisation.

摘要

官僚主义环境给试图作为专业人士蓬勃发展的社会工作者带来了特别令人生畏的问题，因为实践环境可能是不利的。亚里士多德意义上的蓬勃发展需要社会工作者以技巧行事，以实现对客户的响应性（诚实和开放）、公平（正义）和同情心，以及官僚机构的效率。针对贝尔纳多·扎卡 (Bernardo Zacka) 的民族志工作，我们将概述这些目标给官僚环境中的社会工作者带来的特定类型的紧张局势，然后将提供一些缓解这些紧张局势的建议。我们不同意 Zacka 的观点，即美德与试图以道德方式回应官僚主义要求的社会工作者无关，