Political, Economic, and Social Aspects of Professional Authority

In: Families in society: the journal of contemporary human services, Band 71, Heft 9, S. 534-541

Abstract

Human service professionals may experience conflict about using their authority and the power that accompanies it when they must reconcile their humanitarian values about practice with requirements and expectations of the environmental context in which they operate. The author suggests that the political and economic environment, gender issues, and the impact of these on the exchange between client and worker are factors that cause uneasiness for practitioners in exercising authority.