Introduction: ethics, ethical dilemmas, the public service ethos and change

Ethics and ethical dilemmas have emerged as issues of increasing interest in the human services. This may reflect wider concerns about increasing individualisation, the demise of community according to communitarians; ‘liquid modernity’ in Bauman's (2000) terminology. There would seem to be echoes here of the ‘Third Way’ (Tam, 1998). As Marilyn Taylor (2003, p 21) has pointed out, ‘the ‘restoring community’ theme has been given a new lease of life in recent years by a communitarian movement which draws support from across the political spectrum’.

Accounts of this supposed individualisation include explanations based on the demise of grand theories in the more predominantly post-modernist ideological climate that predominated cultural debates in the final years of the 20th century (Fukuyama, 1989). As a positive spin on this, increasing individualisation has been presented in emancipatory terms, the life politics of identity and choice. With increasing reflexivity, according to Giddens (1994), there is less respect for tradition and more dialogue, including increasingly dialogic relations in personal life. The more tradition loses its hold, Giddens (1994) argues, the more individuals are forced to negotiate lifestyle choices among a diversity of options – although critics have pointed to the limitations on such choices, in practice, for the ‘reflexivity losers’ (Lash, 1994, p 120), including those more likely to depend on public services, the disadvantaged and the oppressed.

The notion that there has been a reduction in common values has been similarly challenged along with the view that social solidarity has been declining, with the loss of social capital (Putnam, 2000). The underlying causes have been contested, then, along with the extent to which these processes of individualisation have actually been taking place. Anxieties about the impacts of these processes, however, would seem to be more widely shared. This chapter focuses on these concerns in the particular context of human services in general and caring services more specifically.

Is there an identifiable public service ethos, in the current context, then? If so, is this at risk as a result of another key feature of the contemporary context, policies to promote increasing marketisation, ‘modernisation’ and the New Public Management, the ‘New Welfare’ associated with the ‘New Managerialism?’ (Clarke et al, 2000).