CHAPTER TWO
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
2.1 INTRODUCTION
Professional work Associations has developed Best Practice Standards in Social Work Supervision (hereafter “Supervision Standards”) to support and strengthen supervision for professional social workers. The standards provide a general framework that promotes uniformity and serves as a resource for issues related to supervision in the social work supervisory community. The knowledge base of the social work profession has expanded, and the population it serves has become more complex. Therefore, it is important to the profession to have assurance that all social workers are equipped with the necessary skills to deliver competent and ethical social work services. Equally important to the profession is the responsibility to protect clients.
The NASW and ASWB Task Force on Supervision Standards maintain that supervision is an essential and integral part of the training and continuing education required for the skillful development of professional social workers. Supervision protects clients, supports practitioners, and ensures that professional standards and quality services are delivered by competent social workers. The NASW Code of Ethics and the ASWB Model Social Work Practice Act serve as foundation documents in the development of the supervision standards. These standards support the practice of social workers in various work settings and articulate the importance of a collective professional understanding of supervision within the social work community.
2.2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.2.0 Organizational Fields
DiMaggio and Powell defined a field as “sets of organizations tbat, in the aggregate, constitute an area of institutional life; key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products.” (1983: 148-149). Essential to this definition is the focus upon “sets” or “communities” (Porac, Thomas, & Baden-Fuller, 1989) of organizations that directly interact with one another or are influenced by each other in a meaningful way. Scott (1994) added the idea that patterns of interaction between organizational communities become defined by shared systems of meaning. These meaning systems establish the boundaries of each community of organizations, defining its membership, the appropriate ways of behaving, and the appropriate relationships between organizational communities (Lawrence, 1999). The notion of organizational field thus draws heavily upon the social constructionist account of reality (Berger &Luckman, 1967; Zucker, 1977, 1987). Collective beliefs are seen as emerging from processes of repeated interactions between organizations. Organizations develop categorizations of their exchanges, which achieve the status of objectification and thus constitute social reality. Organizations, initially at least, behave in accordance with this socially constructed reality because to do so reduces ambiguity and uncertainty. Reciprocally shared understandings of appropriate practice permit ordered exchanges. Over time, these shared understandings, or collective beliefs, become reinforced by regulatory processes involving state agencies and professional bodies, which normatively and/or coercively press conformity upon constituent communities. Regulatory processes thus both disseminate and reproduce coded prescriptions of social reality. Deviations from such prescriptions cause discomfort and trigger attempts to justify (that is, legitimize) departures from the social norm (Deephouse, 1999; Elsbach, 1994; Lamertz& Baum, 1997; Miller & Chan, 1995).
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