key: cord-0072636-s8nit6vz
authors: Abramovitz, Mimi; Zelnick, Jennifer R
title: Structural Racism, Managerialism, and the Future of the Human Services: Rewriting the Rules
date: 2021-11-22
journal: Soc Work
DOI: 10.1093/sw/swab051
sha: de0f34889e0371d7a33896d5f6a0db607795a496
doc_id: 72636
cord_uid: s8nit6vz

Over the past several decades, the introduction of the business model, managerialism, into the human services has led to dramatic changes in conditions of work and service delivery. This metric-driven approach increased the emphasis on measured performance outcomes and undercut the mission-driven nature of human services organizations. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread protests against racial injustice exposed routinely ignored structural racism long embedded in our social institutions. This reckoning led social workers to re-examine professional practices, organizational structures, and public policies through a critical, antiracist lens. Applying a racial justice lens to their study of the impact of managerialism in the human services workplace, authors identified troubling evidence of systemic racism in leadership hierarchies, worker control/surveillance on the job, quality of the physical work environment, exposure to workplace violence, exclusion by microinequities, and agency commitment to social justice. Worker resistance, ethical dilemmas, and well-being also varied by race. To become an antiracist profession, social work must seek long-term change in the human services workplace. The following analysis of the combined negative impact of managerialism and structural racism on human services organizations names the problem and presses us to rewrite the rules so we become a racial justice profession.

D uring the last 40 years the human services have incorporated business principles and practices into their organizations. Known as managerialism, this business model has yielded dramatic and troubling changes in service provision, the organization of work, and the experiences of workers and clients (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020) . More recently COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement exposed the deep-seated structural racism embedded throughout society, including the human services. This article examines how the pandemic and the BLM protests exposed and intensified the already problematic relationship between managerialism and structural racism in the human services. The vastly different outcomes for people of color and White people will shape the future unless named, addressed, and changed.

The rise of managerialism in the United States did not happen by chance. Rather, it is associated with the now well-established U-turn in U.S. social welfare policy that gradually replaced the New Deal or the Keynesian social welfare model with what is increasingly known as the neoliberal or market-driven model (Harvey, 2005) . Launched by President Reagan in the 1980s, every U.S. administration since then has adopted neoliberalism in varying degrees. During the last four decades of austerity (and contributing to it), neoliberalism successfully redistributed income upward and downsized the state (Abramovitz, 2018) . Its main tactics included tax cuts, budget cuts, privatization (i.e., shifting social welfare responsibility from the federal government to the private sector), devolution (i.e., shifting social welfare responsibility from the federal government to the states), and weakening the power of social movements.

Privatization, a key neoliberal tactic, is most often associated with efforts to privatize entitlement programs (i.e., turning Social Security and Medicare over to the private sector). Managerialism represents the operationalization of privatization within human services organizations-or, what happens when public and nonprofit agencies import the market-based business model aligned with privatization. Typically introduced by funders, managerialism encourages human services staff (e.g., frontline workers, program managers, and agency directors) to maximize productivity, accountability, efficiency, and standardizationleading agencies and workers to do "more with less" (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020) .

Focused on measurable outcomes, managerialism intensifies the ongoing use of metrics and monitoring to evaluate the performance of agencies, workers, services, and clients (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020) . Some scholars and practitioners praise managerialism's use of metrics and its emphasis on evidence-based outcome measurement. Others critique managerialism for promoting cookie-cutter services, limiting advocacy, and otherwise "stripping the care out of social work" (Baines, 2004) . Managerialism also typically fails to promote the advocacy and social justice ideals aligned with the best of social work professionalism. Salamon and Anheier (1997) disparaged managerialism as the "marketization" of the nonprofit sector. Ritzer (2019) tagged it the "McDonaldization" of society. To understand the past, current, and future impact of managerialism in the human services, we analyze the understudied relationship between managerialism and structural racism that COVID-19 and the BLM protests forced us to see.

Structural racism has a long and complicated history in U.S. social welfare policy and in human services organizations. Like the majority of Americans, human services workers have long recognized the nation's unequal outcomes by race. Many blamed the inequities on racial animosity (i.e., prejudice and discrimination) and/or bad choices made by persons of color (Carvalho, 2016) . The demands of the postwar civil rights movement and the more recent multiracial, intergenerational BLM movement point instead to structural racism supported by a tangled web of visible and invisible rules embedded in the nation's laws, policies, regulations, ideologies, and normative practices. For example, the New Deal's Social Security Act of 1935 created an unemployment insurance program that excluded domestic and farm workers, the only jobs open to many men and women of color then and many years thereafter. However, following World War II, jobs in the expanding welfare state, followed by nonprofit human services agencies, became a major route for upward mobility for women and workers of color excluded by the private sector (Abramovitz, 2018 ). Yet to this day, structural racism persists throughout the labor market, given the practice of occupational segregation by race and gender in the human services and elsewhere. Despite considerable progress over time, both public and nonprofit human services employers, continue to sort employees into different job titles by race and gender. Further they often relegate workers of color and women to the bottom rungs of the job ladder, marked by low wages, poor working conditions, and minimal unionization (Kalleberg, 2012) . Securing racial justice for today and tomorrow, requires that social work helps to "rewrite the rules" (Flynn et al., 2016) .

At the same time, the social work profession has not ignored structural racism. Over the years, social workers and our organizations have participated in the civil rights movement, supported antidiscrimination laws, and otherwise protested racial injustice in the profession and in wider society. Persons of color now lead and staff many national, state, and local human services organizations. Nonetheless, recognizing that past can be prologue, social work has called out the persistence of structural racism within its own ranks. In 2005, the Social Work Congress proposed two still relevant racial equity mandates. They urged the profession (a) to address the effect of racism, other forms of oppression, social injustice, and human rights violations through social work education and practice; and (b) to continuously acknowledge, recognize, confront, and address pervasive racism within social work practice at the individual, agency, and institutional levels (National Association of Social Workers [NASW], 2007, p. 4) . In a major report, Institutional Racism & the Social Work Profession: A Call to Action, NASW (2007) called upon "the entire social work profession in the United States to take responsibility for addressing institutional racism as it is manifested within the profession's own domain as well as in the broader society" (p. 4).

Human services workers and agencies are the "first responders" for people and communities in need. Most are committed to supporting individual and social well-being, addressing community problems, and challenging an unjust system. Few social workers think of themselves as cooperating with structural racism and many contest it. Yet, racialization seeps into our work. In 2020, in the wake of COVID-19 and the BLM movement, human services organizations recommitted the profession to systematically advancing racial justice. Acknowledging that "social workers have played a role in perpetuating racialized practices and policies," NASW (2020) declared, "we have and must continue to work to create an antiracist society" and will work toward ending "racism through public education, social justice advocacy, and professional training." The association also reminded us that social workers can "demonstrate what it means to be antiracist." Similarly, the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) stated, "ongoing personal and professional development in antiracist behavior, cultural humility, and understanding must be a priority." More specifically, "to ensure that social workers meet clients where they are, they must constantly evaluate their own biases" and "if our workplaces do not offer an equally respectful environment for staff and clients, it is our duty to lead efforts that meet new standards of practice excellence" (CSWE, 2020).

Long before SARS-CoV-2, we launched the Human Service Workforce Study-one of the first large-scale studies of managerialism in the human services in the United States-to find out how human services workers experienced managerialism. We collaborated with five major human services organizations and several trade unions to design, pilot, and distribute a survey to the human services workforce in the New York City metropolitan region. Based on an extensive literature review, empirical studies, focus groups, and anecdotal evidence, we identified 45 indicators of managerialism embedded in human services organizations and three areas (service provision, working conditions, and worker well-being) where it affected agencies and workers. Using an anonymous electronic survey, we asked over 3,000 human services workers in New York City to assess the impact of managerialism on these three domains of organizational life. To capture a wide range of experiences, we included frontline workers, supervisors, program managers and agency directors employed in various human services settings. To reflect all views, we asked respondents if the selected managerialism indicators were a "major problem," a "minor prob-lem," "not a problem at all," or "did not happen" at their agency.

We also included items from validated health, stress, and work-life quality scales (analyzed elsewhere). In addition, we constructed a unique score that measured the worker's perception of their agency's "commitment to managerialism" as high, medium, or low. Based on 30 of the indicators of managerialism noted earlier, the score ranged from 30 to 90. Low-managerial settings had a score 49; medium, a score of 50 to 64, and high, a score 65. Participants could also provide comments. We analyzed the data using SPSS version 25. For analytic purposes we combined the major and minor problem categories into a single category termed "problematic." Univariate and bivariate analysis was performed using SPSS version 22. The institutional review boards of Hunter College, City University of New York, and Touro College and University System approved the study. A complete description of the methods has been previously published (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020) . Unless otherwise indicated, all reported differences are statistically significant with p < .001.

Our initial examination of the impact of managerialism on human services organizations and their workforce included 2,732 workers who met the eligibility criteria. We found that regardless of job title, educational attainment, or agency settings, the majority of respondents, which included many workers of color, were troubled by managerialism's intensified focus on productivity, accountability, efficiency, and standardization (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020) . Based on the commitment to managerialism scale, the strongest results showed that more workers in agencies with a high commitment to managerialism than those with a low commitment reported their working conditions, service quality, and well-being as problematic, creating many practice and professional challenges as a result. We concluded that (a) a major tension exists between the "logic of the market" (business methods and principles) and the logic of social work" (values and mission); (b) the resulting trade-offs ultimately threatened the well-being of workers, the quality of services, and the common good; and (c) high-managerial settings risked undermining social work's mission and values, while low-managerial settings can protect professional goals (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020) .

When we first launched our study, we did not plan an in-depth investigation of the relationship between managerialism and structural racism. However, once COVID-19 and the BLM protests laid bare systemic racism throughout society, we returned to our original data. The large number of respondents of color-Black and Latinx (36 percent), multiracial (5 percent), and Asian (5 percent) workers-provided a solid basis for a re-examination of our initial findings. Unfortunately, our new analysis revealed that more Black and Latinx than White practitioners worked in the more problematic high-managerial settings (37 percent versus 30 percent) that also served more stigmatized populations (28 percent versus 17 percent). By underscoring what NASW in 2007 identified as the ways in which structural racism in wider society ripples through social service agencies and social work practice (NASW, 2020), this key finding reinforced the critical need to examine, and undo, the relationship between managerialism and structural racism.

The following sections report the racialized impact of managerialist organizational practices. They speak to workplace hierarchies, worker control on the job, the quality of the physical environment, exposure to workplace violence, exclusion by microinequities and agency commitment to social justice. We also present data on worker resistance, ethical dilemmas, and well-being, which also varied by race. The new findings both mirror what COVID-19 and the BLM movement exposed, and support NASW's 2020 conclusion: "We cannot maximize this mission and fully actualize our core professional values without advocating to reform, dismantle, or even abolish the racist and oppressive systems we may work within and beside" (NASW, 2020).

Students of racism have identified various organizational structures and policies that contribute to structural racism (Ho, 2017; Mayeno, 2015) . These practices include the following: (a) adopting policies and practices without considering the ra-cial effect; (b) appointing predominantly White executive leaders and board members while serving predominantly populations of color; (c) limiting investment in the development of knowledge about (and for) people and communities of color; (d) designing and implementing programs without collaborating with organizations and communities of color; and (e) tolerating microinequities-those ephemeral, hard-to-prove, typically covert and possibly unintentional individual behaviors that single out, overlook, or discount a person due to their membership in a particular group (Rowe, 2008) .

Our job-position data evidenced racialized leadership structures. More Black and Latinx than White workers (67 percent versus 53 percent) occupied frontline positions (i.e., workers and supervisors), while more White workers than Black and Latinx workers filled top-level agency jobs (i.e., program managers and directors: 47 percent versus 33 percent). While many workers disparaged these disparities, the lack of diversity among administrators (60 percent versus 58 percent; not statistically significant), staff (46 percent versus 41 percent; p < .05) and the overall "lack of enough cultural competence" (58 percent versus 49 percent) troubled more Black and Latinx than White workers. The agencies in our study are not alone. Rather, racialized leadership hierarchies exist throughout the human services. In their study of 900 alumni of an antiracist training program, Blitz and Abramovitz (2016) found that 75 percent of the respondents worked in agencies where the majority of executives were White; less than 10 percent worked with an executive director of color. Fifty percent worked with a majority White staff, while 46 percent reported most staff as workers of color or racially diverse. More widely, in several of its surveys of U.S. nonprofit/philanthropic organizations, Non-Profit Quarterly found that 9.5 out of 10 were led by White chief executives. Workers of color comprised only 7 percent of nonprofit chief executives and 18 percent of nonprofit employees (Dubose, 2014) .

Managerialism has profoundly affected labor relations in public and nonprofit human services agen-cies, especially the capacity of workers to maintain decision-making control on the job. Our analysis of the relationship between managerialism and race found that workers' sense of control of their daily work differed by race. More Black and Latinx than White workers reported the lack of control on the job as problematic. They experienced "less professional autonomy" (67 percent versus 56 percent), "not enough say in program decisions" (58 percent versus 47 percent), "the routinization of practice" (74 percent versus 64 percent), and a general lack of control over their work" (40 percent versus 36 percent; p < .05). Managerialist organizations monitor and measure the performance of workers, agencies, and clients in ways that actively direct their work and seriously reduce their discretion. Again, considerably more Black and Latinx than White workers reported greater management control of their daily tasks as problematic. This included electronic monitoring of work time (58 percent versus 48 percent), evaluations based on management targets (60 percent versus 51 percent) and client success (49 percent versus 39 percent), and worry about losing their job based on program outcomes (20 percent versus 17 percent; p < .05). Such monitoring and surveillance practices date back to the Progressive Era when Taylorism and scientific time management subdivided factory work into timed and standardized tasks to increase assembly-line efficiency and profits. Research links a lack of control to stress, poor physical and mental health, and a sense of hopelessness and meaninglessness (Jensen et al., 2013) . In contrast, worker control on the job correlates with a sense of pride, creativity, and meaningful work.

Physical Setting. Forty years of neoliberal austerity and budget cuts threaten the quality of the physical work environment of an agency, a key component of a healthy workplace. Nonprofit agencies still struggle to find clean, well-painted, affordable spaces that preserve the health and dignity of workers and service users. Similarly, local governments often locate public agencies in poorly maintained, pest infected, overcrowded buildings with locked windows (Forman, 2014) . The pandemic highlighted the importance of the physical work environment to health, especially air quality, ventilation, and access to physically distant work spaces for essential workers required to work in-person (often without personal protective equipment). Degraded work environments increased workers' risk of contracting the virus (Nwanaji-Enwerem, Allen, & Beamer, 2020). Emerging data further suggest that workplace characteristics drove (or intensified) the racial disparities in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality (Wilder, 2020) .

We found a strong association between the managerialist business model and hazards in the physical work environment in general, but especially for Black and Latinx workers. More Black and Latinx than White workers reported poor air quality (30 percent versus 17 percent), poor ventilation (34 percent versus 24 percent), and lack of private office space (39 percent versu 29 percent). While more follow-up is needed, these data suggest that continued austerity would likely exacerbate the poor physical conditions conducive to virus spread (and other health threats), especially in managerial settings that also included more workers of color. The pandemic's uncertain end combined with the likelihood of mounting funding shortfalls, premature agency openings, and the potential lack of protective equipment suggest a problematic "new normal" for the human services in general and for workers of color in particular.

Workplace Violence. While workplace violence, including physical assault and verbal abuse, can happen anywhere, this hazard is less often studied in the human services than in other healthcare settings. Lack of attention to workplace violence is especially troubling in managerialist agencies likely to be less supportive of workers' needs (Tsui, 2004) . Our study found more frequent workplace violence in high-managerial agencies as well as racial variations. More Black and Latinx than White workers reported verbal abuse (32 percent versus 28 percent; p < .05) and physical assault (8 percent versus 6 percent; p < .05) on the job. However, the biggest difference by race was the agency's lack of response to reported complaints. Of the workers who reported such an incident, 65 percent of White, compared with 45 percent of Black and Latinx, workers said that the agency took their report seriously. This disparity in response by race points to both the presence of structural racism and microinequities, discussed next as structures of exclusion.

ABRAMOVITZ AND ZELNICK / Structural Racism, Managerialism, and the Future of the Human Services

First conceptualized by Mary Rowe (2008) , microinequities refer to ordinary organizational practices or policies of exclusion such as providing less mentoring, supervision, support as well as fewer resources and fewer opportunities to one group of workers (most often female and persons of color) than another. Microinequities differ from the more widely discussed microaggressions or interpersonal slights, such as not thanking people, checking emails or texting during a conversation, interrupting a person midsentence, being late to a meeting, or mispronouncing a name (Brogaard, 2013) .

We found that more Black and Latinx than White workers experienced such exclusions: lack of support from coworkers (56 percent versus 42 percent); too much coworker competition (42 percent versus 28 percent); lack of support from supervisors (70 percent versus 58 percent); lack of access to supervisors (58 percent versus 50 percent); lack of respect from supervisors (45 percent versus 37 percent); and less opportunity for training or professional development (64 percent versus 55 percent). Repeated microinequities send devaluing messages that leave workers feeling unwelcome, unsupported, and invisible (Martinson, 2013) . Microinequities can discourage or impair work. They wear people down, undermine confidence, and cause people to leave. While legally not discrimination, microinequities raise ethical questions about racial justice in the workplace and create the principle scaffolding for discrimination in the United States (Rowe, 2008) .

Managerialism poses challenges for advocacy that are key to social work's commitment to social change and for engaging with clients and communities. As budget cuts force agencies structured by managerialism to "do more with less," advocacy ends up on the chopping block (Baines, 2008) . While 50 percent of all workers regarded the loss of advocacy as a problem, more Black and Latinx workers than White workers found it problematic that their agency "does not ask clients for their opinion" (56 percent versus 50 percent; p < .05) and "lacks accountability to the community" (56 percent versus 41 percent). Given that human services agencies tend to serve communities of color, the heightened sensitivity to the importance of advocacy among workers of color may be an in-direct reflection of the structural racism that impoverishes and marginalizes the persons and communities of color they serve.

Workers who resent the problematic impact of managerialism, especially the interference with professional autonomy and decision making, often try to resist. Many respondents admitted that their effort to balance the demands of managerialism and their social work values "sometimes or often" led them to bend the rules, although the response varied by race (Abramovitz & Zelnick, 2018) . More Black and Latinx workers than White workers indicated that agency staff "changed reports to meet measurement demands" (48 percent versus 38 percent), "inflated statistics" (34 percent versus 27 percent), and "ignored eligibility requirements" (28 percent versus 24 percent; p < .05). Gallina (2010) observed that when social workers find the need to bend the rules, they often face ethical dilemmas.

Such perverse incentives induced by managerialism reflect workers' efforts to mediate the built-in tension between the "logic of the market" (the business model) and "the logic of social work" (mission and values). The resulting ethical conflicts varied by race: 64 percent of Black and Latinx and 53 percent of White workers experienced ethical dilemmas. At the same time, a large number of both White and Black and Latinx workers (75 percent versus 65 percent) acknowledged that they have worked "overtime without pay," not always approved by their agency, to ensure that they met their client's needs. According to Baines (2010) , workers who sacrificed their own time effectively expanded their agency's service capacity. She adds that such sacrifice among a largely female workforce exploits the gendered norm of selflessness associated with women's traditional role. Hammonds (2019) suggests that workers who bend the rules when continuously exposed to situations they cannot control may resist by slowing their work pace (i.e., take long breaks, make personal calls, use social media, conduct other nonwork tasks on work time, and otherwise evade standard work norms to reclaim control of their time). Ackroyd and Thompson (2016) refer to such oppositional misbehaviors as "informal resistance." Baines & Daly (2015) describe these evasions of control as hidden resistance that may tarnish the promise of managerialism. She explains that when workers slow their performance or bend the rules to leverage more time and resources on behalf of professional values, this pushback may also, intentionally or not, undercut managerialism's promise to boost "productivity," "accountability," and "efficiency," and may actually create the conditions for managerialism to falter.

Efforts by workers to manage the conflict between "the logic of the market" and "the logic of social work," or to fill the gap between what agencies can provide and what clients need, may impair their well-being. Studies of the relationship between stress and well-being document that stressful working conditions, like those produced by Managerialism, can lead to poor health outcomes (Johnson et al., 2005) . Our study, one of the few focused on stress experienced by human services workers, found that the pressures of managing managerialism translated into high levels of stress and burnout for all workers regardless of race. That is, 59 percent of Black and Latinx and 58 percent of White workers reported job-related stress "sometimes or often." Likewise, 85 percent of Black, Latinx, and White workers reported burnout. In contrast physical health symptoms, job satisfaction, and turnover varied widely by race. More Black and Latinx than White workers reported work-related digestion issues (42 percent versus 37 percent; p < .05), high blood pressure (32 percent versus 18 percent), and smoking (12 percent versus 9 percent; p < .05). More than one-third of the Black and Latinx workers reported job dissatisfaction compared with 25 percent of White workers. Reflecting the widely recognized problem of retention (or turnover) in the human services, even more Black and Latinx (54 percent) than White workers (48 percent) were "thinking of leaving their job." Given managerialism's predicted longevity, these problematic outcomes raise serious questions about the ongoing well-being and future capacity of the human services workforce, social service agencies, and the clients they serve.

Despite the distressing tensions between the "logic of the market" and the "logic of social work" described here, large numbers of social workers remain optimistic for the future, though far less so in high-managerial agencies (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020) . The overwhelming majority of respondents of color and White respondents reported that they "find their work interesting" (93 percent versus 96 percent), that "their work makes an important contribution to society" (97 percent), that their "work is important" (91 percent versus 92 percent), and that "they believe in their program" (86 pecent versus 90 percent).

The fight for racial justice led by BLM and the racialized inequality laid bare by COVID-19 motivated social work to better honor its professional values and mission by reckoning with the realities of systemic racism. Applying a racial lens to education and practice, the profession has begun rethink its past, disrupt the present, and advance social change. The previously quoted NASW and CSWE statements addressing systemic racism suggest that leading social work organizations now recognize the need to re-examine our work. In the spring of 2020, a national survey of frontline social workers identified racism as the most important social justice issue confronting the profession However, these important first steps risk foundering on a lack of follow-through and a lack of attention to the intersection of managerialism and systematic racism. Driven by austerity, privatization, and market principles, the managerialist emphasis on productivity, efficiency, accountability, and standardization rewards individualized interventions, prioritizes bureaucratic/organizational needs, upholds the neoliberal status quo, and otherwise penalize the profession's rising efforts to undo systemic racism.

What is to be done? An earlier study of social work and systemic racism identified specific steps that human services organization and the profession can take to progress toward racial equity. Prior to the current reckoning with racism Abramovitz and Blitz, 2015, surveyed over 500 social workers who had participated in an extended antiracist training. Asked if and how their organizations tried to advance racial equity, the five activities they cited most frequently were (1) promoting informal staff conversations about racial equity; (2) opening discussions of racial equity with clients or students;

(3) encouraging staff to attend internal or external antiracist trainings; (4) modifying practice with clients and constituents to address racial equity; and (5) changing leadership, staffing, and board composition to reflect client and community demographics and priorities. Additionally, they recommended that schools and agencies could (a) develop data to track racial disparities; (b) change the organization's physical environment to reflect diversity; (c) modify clinical, student, or staff evaluation forms to address racial equity; (d) ensure buy-in from organizational leaders; and (e) actively change problematic service delivery patterns.

Evidence exists that the police killing of George Floyd and others and the current reckoning with racism has moved some in social work from words to action. A review of school and agency websites and anecdotal evidence reveal small steps that, if fully implemented and sustained, promise to create a more racially just future for the human services and the social work profession. Social work organizations have begun to (a) revamp their mission statements, brochures, and other public materials to support racial equity including public denunciations of the police brutality; (b) produce educational materials for clients, constituents, staff, and boards that openly address the need for racial equity; (c) replace the language of "diversity" and "cultural competence" with antiracist terms; and (d) conduct truly antiracist trainings. Other examples of swift, responsive policy change on the national front include numerous podcasts and webinars drawing hundreds of social workers, the current update of CSWE's Education and Policy Accreditation Standards, and the Social Work Responds initiative launched by the Association of Social Work Boards, CSWE, and NASW that include information about voter suppression and voting rights.

However, the devil is in the details, especially the intersection of managerialism and systemic racism. We ignore the current tension between the "logic of the market" (i.e., managerialism) and the "logic of social work" (i.e., professional values and mission) at our own risk. Managerialism aligns with elements of the pro-market business model such as performance management, doing more with less, and the routinization of practice that stand in the way both advocacy and sustaining changes made to dismantle structural racism. Only by confronting managerialism and structural racism together can social work honor its social justice commitments, advance organizational change, and intentionally struggle to achieve an antiracist future.

Regulating the lives of women: Social welfare policy from colonial times to the present

Moving toward racial equity: The Undoing Racism Workshop and organizational change

Business as usual? A wake-up call for the human services

The SAGE handbook of the sociology of work and employment

Caring for nothing: Work organization and unwaged labour in social services

Neoliberal restructuring, activism/participation, and social unionism in the nonprofit social services. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly

If we don't get back to where we were before': Working in the restructured non-profit social services

Resisting regulatory rigidities: Lessons from front-line care work

When does race matter? Examining antiracist organizational change

Micro-inequities: 40 years later. Psychology Today

Poverty and decision-making

Two pandemics

The nonprofit sector has a Ferguson problem

NYC's silent infrastructure challenge: Aging public buildings

Rewrite the racial rules: Building an inclusive American economy

Conflict between professional ethics and practice demands: Social workers' perceptions

Vicarious trauma, perceived stress, and self-care among social workers: A quantitative analysis (Publication No. 10930823) [Doctoral dissertation, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology

A brief history of neoliberalism

8 ways people of color are tokenized in nonprofits

High-performance work systems and job control: Consequences for anxiety, role overload, and turnover intentions

The experience of work-related stress across occupations

Job quality and precarious work: Clarifications, controversies, and challenges

Seeing and naming racism in nonprofit and public organizations. Mayeno Consulting

Social workers must help dismantle systems of oppression and fight racism within social work profession

The McDonalization of society in the digital age

Micro-affirmations & micro-inequities

Defining the nonprofit sector: A cross-national analysis ( Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Series 4)

Gone with the wind: The impacts of managerialism on human services

The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on racial and ethnic minorities in the United States

The perils of privatization: Bringing the business model into the human services

Social work practice during the COVID-19 pandemic

Zelnick, MSW, ScD, is professor and social welfare policy sequence chair