University of British Columbia Leadership and Management of Human Services Analysis Leadership and management are two terms that are used interchangeably b

University of British Columbia Leadership and Management of Human Services Analysis Leadership and management are two terms that are used interchangeably but represent different roles that have different functions. Understanding the differences and similarities is essential for social work administrators as they develop leadership strategies within organizations. Understanding the functions associated with leadership and management roles can influence how social workers supervise and work with colleagues in administrative practice. As you prepare for this Discussion, consider how your understanding of leadership and management roles might affect you when you assume a supervisory position.

BY DAY 3

Post an analysis of the similarities and differences of leadership and management roles as they relate to human services organizations. Include how your understanding of these roles may affect you as you assume a supervisory position.

Needs to be minimum 2 paragraphs.

The following is a link to the textbook that is needed for this course. For this week we are looking at chapter 1, 2, 7 & 8.

The link is: https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/#/books/97814522…

I also attached an article. Administration in Social Work
ISSN: 0364-3107 (Print) 1544-4376 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wasw20
Theoretical Perspectives on the Social
Environment to Guide Management and
Community Practice
An Organization-in-Environment Approach
Elizabeth A. Mulroy PhD
To cite this article: Elizabeth A. Mulroy PhD (2004) Theoretical Perspectives on the Social
Environment to Guide Management and Community Practice, Administration in Social Work, 28:1,
77-96, DOI: 10.1300/J147v28n01_06
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1300/J147v28n01_06
Published online: 23 Sep 2008.
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Theoretical Perspectives
on the Social Environment to Guide
Management and Community Practice:
An Organization-in-Environment Approach
Elizabeth A. Mulroy, PhD
ABSTRACT. This paper introduces a conceptual framework called Organization-in-Environment that is intended to help social work students,
particularly those preparing for careers in management and community
practice, understand the complexity of the social environment in the context of a global economy. This model is based on two assumptions. First,
organizations and communities are embedded in large, complex macro
systems that helped to create institutional barriers of the past. Second, organizations are civic actors with the potential to strengthen communities
and change institutional inequities set in larger societal systems. Theories
of social justice, the political economy, vertical and horizontal linkages,
organization/environment dimensions, and interorganizational collaboration are presented and used to help analyze the model. Case examples of
privatization, gentrification, and homelessness are used to illustrate theory
for practice. Finally, implications are drawn for a future-oriented practice
that emphasizes external relations and their political dimensions: strategic
management, interorganizational collaboration, community building, regional action, and a commitment to social justice. [Article copies available
for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH.
E-mail address: Website: © 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
Elizabeth A. Mulroy is Associate Professor, School of Social Work, University of
Maryland-Baltimore, 525 West Redwood Street, Baltimore, MD 21201 (E-mail:
emulroy@ssw.umaryland.edu).
The author thanks Michael J. Austin for his very helpful comments on earlier versions
of the article.
Administration in Social Work, Vol. 28(1) 2004
http://www.haworthpress.com/web/ASW
 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1300/J147v28n01_06
77
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ADMINISTRATION IN SOCIAL WORK
KEYWORDS. Social justice, social environment theory, organizational
change, social change, community theory, collaboration
The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of the social environment and
to consider some theoretical perspectives of management and community practice.
The study of macro level factors begins with an examination of the social environment; namely understanding how people interact–how they respond, adapt, and
cope with family, friends, peers, and intimate others, and how they interact in less
personal relationships within work organizations, schools, or associations in which a
person assumes a role as citizen, producer, consumer, or client. It should then examine social norms, social institutions, and institutional arrangements–the working
agreements about the distribution of wealth, power, prestige, privilege associated
with race, ethnicity, gender, age, mental status, or sexual orientation. While designed to create stability for society, institutional arrangements can be a source of
conflict for those who experience institutional inequities (Mulroy, 1995a).
Students of management and community practice, and in fact all social work students, need to critically examine how macro level factors affect the lives of people
who live in neighborhoods and communities, especially the lives of very low-income
children and their families who live in neighborhood poverty. Gephart (1997) writes:
Existing research suggests the interaction of several forces in American
cities over the past fifty years has led to the increased spatial concentration
of poverty, the geographic spread of concentrated poverty, and the increased clustering of poverty with other forms of social and economic disadvantage. These forces have altered the context of urban poverty at the
community level and created the neighborhoods and communities of concentrated poverty . . . (1994, pp. 3-4)
The concept of the social environment becomes more holistic when we include the physical environment, especially in relation to land use and population
distribution (Norlin & Chess, 1997). The question for management and community practice is how do we understand the social environment in this way, and
how do we educate students to manage and change it?
While a discussion of the social environment usually begins with community
theory and organization theory as if communities and organizations were separate
topics, a broader and more integrated conceptual framework is needed for the educational task at hand. Communities and organizations are located in larger, complex systems as part of an ecology of shifting resources and constraints. Based on
a theoretical foundation that informs this reality, the next generation of practitioners will need to:
Elizabeth A. Mulroy
79
• Identify and understand the critical strategic issues external to their organizations.
• Assess the inter-relatedness and cross-cutting impacts of the issues.
• Analyze how the issues affect their agency’s mission, purposes, resources,
and operations.
• Learn which other organizations are affected across a range of community
types such as geographic community and communities of interest.
• Determine which theoretical perspectives offer guidance to inform a range
of practice innovations that will help to solve the presenting problems
while holding firm to the overriding goal of social justice.
This article examines the social environment by building on social systems and
ecological theories (not reviewed here) in order to focus on the political economy,
vertical and horizontal linkages, organization-environment relations, and interorganizational collaboration. These are selected for illustrative purposes to demonstrate how they can inform macro-level practice. The goal of helping students
understand the social environment is related to the following four points:
1. The social environment and the physical environment are tightly linked
and intertwined.
2. Factors and relationships external to an organization are important.
3. Public policies and societal factors are continuous forces of change not
only for organizations but also for the communities in which organizations
are located.
4. A commitment to social justice is a core principle that frames management
and community practice.
A MODEL OF ORGANIZATION-IN-ENVIRONMENT
Social Justice
Social justice, a core value of social work (Reamer, 2000), drives the model
(see Figure 1). Social justice has historically guided reformers and social workers
to re-frame the pressing social issues of the times and to engage in the complex
work of finding solutions to vexing societal problems (Addams, 1910; Wald,
1915; Schorr, 1964; Schorr, 1997; Patti, 2000). Today this means confronting the
rearrangement of institutional barriers that emerged in our urban areas during the
past 30 years–barriers that helped to create and sustain neighborhood poverty that
continue to affect the health and well-being of residents and prevent the advancement of many very low-income people, especially minorities.
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ADMINISTRATION IN SOCIAL WORK
FIGURE 1. Organization-in-Environment: A Conceptual Framework
Social Justice
Level 3
Societal/Policy Forces
Level 2
Locality-Based Community
IMPACTS
Level 1 Agency
SOLUTIONS
Effectiveness
Efficiency
Equity
Job, Housing,
Education, Services
Economic Globalization
Market Economy
Mulroy, E. 2003
The starting point for most discussions of social justice is the theory of justice
developed by philosopher John Rawls (1972) who proposed three guiding principles: equality in basic liberties, equality of opportunity for advancement, and
positive discrimination for the underprivileged in order to ensure equity. Rawls
derived these principles of justice on what he believed reasonable people, with
no prior knowledge or stake in the outcome, would apply to a society in which
they were to live (Ife, 1996).
Ife (1996) moves the analysis of social justice from the individual to the community level. Following Ife’s thinking, social justice at the macro level is based on six
Elizabeth A. Mulroy
81
principles: structural disadvantage, empowerment, needs, rights, peace and non-violence, and participatory democracy. He argues that unless changes are made to the
basic structures of oppression, which create and perpetuate an unequal and inequitable society, any social justice strategy has limited value. “. . . all programmes that
claim a social justice label need to be evaluated in terms of their relationship with the
dominant forms of structural oppression, specifically class, gender, and race/ethnicity” (1996, p. 55). He believes that a specific commitment to addressing the inequalities of class, gender and race/ethnicity must be a core element of any social justice
strategy, and the guiding principle of community practice (p. 56).
Harvey (1973), writing from an economic and urban perspective states, “The
evidence suggests that the forces of urbanization are emerging strongly and
moving to dominate the centre stage of world history . . . We have the opportunity to create space, to harness creatively the forces making for urban differentiation. But in order to seize these opportunities we have to confront the forces that
create cities as alien environments, that push urbanization in directions alien to
our individual or collective purpose. To confront these forces we first have to
understand them” (pp. 313-314). That is, social workers must first understand
how the forces of oppression operate across a metropolitan landscape in order to
devise strategies capable of bringing about lasting change.
Levels of Influence
Figure 1 depicts a social environment in which communities and agencies are
part of larger systems. The first set of arrows suggests that macro level factors Impact communities and the organizations in them. The second set of arrows suggests that organizations and communities work to find Solutions to help break
down or change oppressive institutional barriers in the larger society. The circular
pattern emphasizes the interconnectedness of the ideas presented (Ife, 1996).
Level 3–Societal/Policy Factors
Macro level factors include, but are not limited to the market economy,
globalization, immigration, poverty, and a range of public policies. Institutional arrangements are formulated at Level 3. These may include, for example, international real estate investment and financial lending decisions and
supportive public policies related to housing and urban development; national or regional labor market needs and supportive federal policies and regulations related to immigration; medical, managed care, and health facilities
decisions driven by insurance companies; or shifting national political priorities toward privatization of public services generally and the adoption of a
contracting and purchase of services culture.
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ADMINISTRATION IN SOCIAL WORK
Political Economy. The political economy concerns the intersection of events
and decisions in a community and the wider polity that have economic implications and political considerations. For example, the political economy involves
powerful elite forces that own and control economic capital, use economic resources to promote industrial growth, and compete for control over modes of production and resources. Land, for example, is considered an economic resource to
be brought to its highest and best use. The urban political economy creates the
physical environment through real estate development and the highly politicized
processes of land use planning and zoning with their manifestations in state and
local-level land use plans, governance, and control (Feagin, 1998; Gottdiener,
1994; Lefebrvre, 1991). In The Political Economy of the Black Ghetto, Tabb
(1970) asserted that racism is perpetuated by elements of oppression within an
economic and political system that must be understood as a system (p. vii).
The political economy can also be applied to organizations and their environments (Hasenfeld, 1983; 1992). The capacity of a human service organization to
survive and to deliver services in the 21st century is based on its ability to mobilize power, legitimacy, and economic resources (Hasenfeld, 1992, p. 96). For
nonprofit organizations this is reflected in the increased degree of dependency
on resources external to their own organizations from federal and state grants
and contracts, and private philanthropic grants from foundations (Gibelman,
2000; Martin, 2000). Functions of management include the acquisition of a wide
range of external funding, financial control through management of multiple
grants and contracts, impacts on program implementation, competition among
internal programs for scarce resources, and effects on organization-wide fiscal
stability (Gummer, 1990). Implications of resource dependency include the political effects on nonprofit and public human service agencies when national and
state budget priorities shift, and newly elected legislative bodies fail to
reauthorize allocated funds for existing demonstration and other programs
mid-stream in their implementation cycles (Mulroy & Lauber, 2002). The concept of privatization is used in the following example to illustrate the ways in
which macro level factors can operate in the social environment, in this case on
agencies directly. (A range of diverse macro level factors can be introduced in
Level 3 for purposes of analysis.)
Example: Privatization. Privatization is the shifting of service delivery from
the public sector to the private for-profit and nonprofit sectors through contracts
and the purchase of services. It is a market-oriented approach in which individual nonprofit human service organizations compete for public funds on an uneven playing field. It increased competition first within the nonprofit sector as
large and small nonprofits vied with each other for public sector contracts in a
period of overall reduced federal expenditures for domestic social services.
Competition then increased outside the sector as nonprofits had to compete with
Elizabeth A. Mulroy
83
private firms. Hard hit were community-based nonprofit organizations with social change missions (Fabricant & Fisher, 2002).
The for-profit sector has benefited from privatization, particularly after passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Highly
resourced, large corporations with no ties to local communities offered large
state and county agencies the chance to purchase packages of diverse services
that included management information systems, welfare-to-work job training
programs, Medicaid billing, case management, and direct services to recipients
(Frumkin & Andre-Clark, 2000).
Many smaller nonprofit human service organizations faced serious dilemmas
such as being priced out of existence, scaling back services to the poorest or
sickest, and proving in the short term that their interventions get results. When
viewed from a social justice perspective, implications of privatization can be
drawn for service equity, access, cost, continuity, and quality of care (see
Gibelman & Demone, 2002).
Level 2–The Geographic Community
Institutional arrangements developed in Level 3 are absorbed and implemented in Level 2. The locality-based community can be a neighborhood, city,
county, or other jurisdiction with boundaries and an interactional field (Warren,
1978) of subunits that serve collective needs. The locality-based definition of
community for Level 2 was selected because it has a geographic boundary, be it
a neighborhood, city, or county that students in field placement internships can
readily identify. Other definitions of community can be woven in as needed (see
Fellin, 2001).
Vertical Links as “Windows on the World.” The pioneering work of Roland
Warren (1971; 1977; 1978) provides a powerful and provocative concept for analyzing communities in terms of their horizontal and vertical patterns. The horizontal pattern is understood to be an “interactional field” that viewed
community as the aggregate of people and organizations occupying a geographic area whose interactions represent systemic interconnections (1978). He
explicitly stated that the interactional arena was of social rather than physical
space. The importance of vertical ties was that they linked community units to
units outside the community, or to the macro system and thus to the larger society and culture. Such ties could have a number of aspects that were economic,
thought systems or ideologies, economic roles or occupations, technologies,
public behavior, common values and norms, patterns of land use, social stratification, power structures, organizational linkages, and social problems (Warren,
1978, pp. 432-437).
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ADMINISTRATION IN SOCIAL WORK
The concept of a vertical pattern of ties is an intriguing idea to me because it
introduces this question: To what extent does the strength of a community’s vertical ties determine the resources and support it gets from national, state, city, or
county sources in an increasingly global economy? My interest in this question
launched the trajectory of my own research based on the macro system approach. I have attempted to systematically analyze relationships between aspects of the macro system and community subunits (see for example, Mulroy,
2000; 1997; 1995a; 1988; Mulroy & Shay, 1997; Mulroy & Shay, 1998; Mulroy &
Lauber, 2002). The reported findings suggest that a community’s physical environment is tightly linked with the social environment; patterns of land use such
as urban sprawl can determine the status of a community’s health and the
well-being of its residents; and in the global economy economic decisions made
by multi-national firms with no national or local community affiliation or loyalty profoundly affect both. The gentrification of a community will serve to illustrate these concepts.
Example: Gentrification. Staying with the theme of neighborhood and concentrated poverty introduced at the beginning of the paper, the concept of gentrification is used to illustrate two main points; namely the decline of urban
neighborhoods and urban sprawl.
First, the decline of many urban neighborhoods was part of a larger pattern of
urbanization and sprawl that occurred over decades. Federal and state housing
and urban policies, for example, are examples of vertical links that attempted to
respond to urban blight in inner city neighborhoods and central business districts
by targeting deteriorating commercial districts and residential neighborhoods
for revitalization. Housing is a connector between the physical and social environments in all neighborhoods, including those targeted for gentrification.
Housing concerns affordability, security, safety, health, neighbor and social relations, and confers status. The location of housing determines a household’s access to facilities, services, jobs, transportation syst…
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