This article considers a specific finding from a wider study examining factors that contribute to ethical stress, generated by value–behaviour conflict, in a sample of 100 criminal justice social workers in Scotland. Variables were demonstrably congruent with neoliberal ideology, and were therefore expected to cause social workers considerable ethical stress. This article focuses on the finding that younger, less experienced workers object significantly less to the neoliberal-informed changes in criminal justice social work and suffer significantly less ethical stress as a result. This finding has implications for social work more widely and the article considers reasons for the difference between younger, less experienced and older, more experienced workers, including the influence of three decades of neoliberalism and the difficulty that social work programme providers might have in promoting or ensuring a social justice alignment in students’ practice.

Abstract This article considers the impact of generational changes on the new cohort of social work students most of whom were born post-1995, and therefore belong to ‘iGeneration’ (iGen). This article is especially concerned with the finding that the generation before iGen is more right-wing authoritarian than all post-war generations and what this might mean for the future of social work should that trajectory continue. A study was undertaken to examine the attitudes of 122 iGen students in first-year university course in Scotland. Results show that mean attitudinal measures were right-wing authoritarian in relation to crime and punishment and to unemployed people. Social work students aligned more in their attitudes with their primary education colleagues and less with their less authoritarian community education colleagues, and, overall, the iGen cohort was significantly more right-wing authoritarian than their older colleagues. In essence, there was evidence to suggest that an individualistic, self-sufficiency neoliberal narrative had been quite profoundly internalised by the iGen cohort of students. Implications of a new individualistic practice are considered, and suggestions for social work education programmes are made.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract