Critical Public Management Studies: A Research Agenda Proposition

Can social services sustainably operate from a critical perspective that promotes social justice? In the last four decades, the shift toward market-based operation of social services has positioned management as the central discipline in the public field, binding social work managers to neo-managerial objectives such as the measurability and economic efficiency of professional practice. Together with tight resources, these conditions undermine the social justice–informed foundations of social work, forcing social work managers to move between obedience and resistance vis-à-vis neo-managerialism. However, explorations of the possibility of constructing a fundamental and contextualized critical theory and practice of social services management are absent from the literature. This conceptual article seeks to address this gap by portraying the idea of critical public management (i.e., managerial practice focused on promoting social justice within social services) and discussing its possible practical and theoretical contributions to a sustainable correlation between social services management and social work’s social justice foundations.