Failure in welfare partnerships – A gender hypothesis: Reflections on a serendipity pattern in Local Safeguarding Children Boards
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076717751037 |
| Author | Adina I Dudau,Laura McAllister |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Failure in welfare
partnerships – A gender
hypothesis: Reflections
on a serendipity pattern
in Local Safeguarding
Children Boards
Adina I Dudau
Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, UK
Laura McAllister
Cardiff University, UK
Abstract
This article examines the roles that occupational segregation and gender bias in the
welfare professions play in persistent failures in inter-agency and inter-professional col-
laborations. Drawing on case study evidence from a Local Safeguarding Children Board
in England, a ‘serendipity pattern’ of gender dominance is identified within professions
affecting inter-professional collaborations such as those prevalent in Local Safeguarding
Children Boards. As we assign this pattern ‘strategic interpretation’, we suggest that
policy measures taken to augment the effectiveness of welfare partnerships have, so far,
paid insufficient attention to the critical variable of gender, due to over-emphasis on the
organisations, rather than the professions, involved. The article’s contribution to prac-
tice is unravelling the potential of this oversight to contribute to failure to establish
a collaborative mind-set. Our contribution to theory is highlighting specific cultural
barriers to inter-professional collaborations, unravelling the power differentials
rooted in gender inequity in public sector workforces and challenging professional
and organizational traditionalism. In doing so, we offer empirical evidence of the
‘gender hypothesis’ in welfare partnerships and indicate how future investigations
might be pursued in this area.
Public Policy and Administration
2019, Vol. 34(1) 83–102
!The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0952076717751037
journals.sagepub.com/home/ppa
Corresponding author:
Adina I Dudau, University of Glasgow, Adam Smith Business School, University Avenue, Glasgow, G12 8QQ,
UK.
Email: Adina.Dudau@glasgow.ac.uk
Keywords
Culture, gender, Local Safeguarding Children Boards, partnerships, professions, seren-
dipity pattern
Introduction
Partnership working has been ‘in vogue’ since the late 1980s (Hudson, 1987) and
has been promoted by numerous government reforms in the past two decades in
most OECD countries. In spite of criticisms, it is still seen as a pre-requisite for
effective policy design and delivery. The UK, in particular, is home to a plethora
of alliances for public policy formulation and delivery. For example, the English
and Welsh Local Safeguarding Children Boards (LSCBs) are the del ivery instru-
ments of a statutory requirement for ‘mandated joined-up working’ (Barton and
Quinn, 2001) whereby relevant local welfare agencies work find themselves under
a statutory duty to work together and coordinate previously individual efforts to,
for example, adapt national legislation to local needs, as well as to create their
own local strategies within the wider policy scope of ‘safeguarding children’.
LSCBs were introduced through the Every Ch ild Matters (ECM) policy pro-
gramme
1
(Department for Education and Skills [DfES], 2004; HM
Government, 2006; HMSO, 2004), following a number of infamous cases of
service failure due to lack of communication between the relevant professions,
often with tragic consequences (as, for example, in the case of Victoria Climbie
´–
see Laming, 2003).
Despite the expectations that the introduction of a statutory duty to collaborate
will make these partnerships more effective, the outcomes have been far from
encouraging. Two years after the introduction of the ECM policy programme,
the death of baby Peter (an 18-month-old baby whose abuse was left undetected
by Haringey Council professionals, despite several points of contact with numerous
welfare agencies – see Ofsted, Healthcare Commission and HM Inspectorate of
Constabulary, 2008) further exposed inherent obstacles to communication between
organisations, despite the ECM having introduced new institutional mechanisms
precisely to tackle them. More recently, cases such as Daniel Pelka’s (Lock, 2013)
and Ayeeshia-Jayne Smith’s (Myres, 2017) have brought these issues back to the
fore of public scrutiny.
What the public perceived as policy failure needs to be scrutinised in the light of
literature suggesting, for example, that there are ‘gradients’ to failure (McConnell’s
(2015) tolerable, conflicted and outright failure framework) and that failure is
rarely objective, but rather is ‘in the eyes of the beholder’ or, at best, in the eyes
of the stakeholders (Zittoun, 2015). Since the public at large is an important policy
stakeholder, child deaths following miscommunication between local government
agencies, even as isolated cases (i.e. even when they fall in McConnell’s (2015)
category of ‘tolerability’), can lead to programme failure which can be followed,
more or less directly, by political failure. To prevent such outcomes, policy
84 Public Policy and Administration 34(1)
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