Governance as Recognition in Social Work Management: a Critical Application of Charles Taylor’s Philosophy

Abstract

Contemporary social work management is characterized by a profound tension between the instrumental imperatives of neoliberal governancestandardization, metricization, and efficiency, and the profession’s foundational ethical commitment to human dignity, relationship, and context. This paper argues that Charles Taylor’s philosophy of the “politics of recognition” and the “dialogical self” provides a critical framework for diagnosing this tension as a systemic crisis of misrecognition and for reconceiving social work governance as a practice of institutional recognition. Through a critical conceptual analysis, this study posits that dominant managerialist models enact epistemic and ethical violence by flattening complex client and practitioner identities into homogenized categories of “cases” and “service units.” In response, a Taylor-informed model of Governance as Recognition is proposed, founded on three pillars: (1) Governance as a dialogical rather than monological process, fostering a “fusion of horizons” between institution and community; (2) Leadership as the stewardship of a “social imaginary” centered on constitutive goods like dignity and relational integrity; and (3) Organizational structures designed to facilitate “strong evaluation” based on these goods, not merely instrumental outcomes.