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Abstract
In the current dual context of Black Lives Matter/defund the police and calls for accountability to those whom social work has harmed as part of the state machinery, this article returns to the debate on state theory. The article explores three state-linked forms of care, coercion and control: stealth coercion/control (in aged-care); population-linked coercion/control, and police and carceral-linked coercion/control. The article analyses what is missing in state theory in a neoliberal world and argues that social work needs models of practice and theory that are themselves a form of resistance and relative autonomy from the state in that they challenge the oppressive state machinery while making demands on the state for equity and fairness. This model permits social work to be humble in the face of lived experience and grounded in the priorities of the community, rather than uncritically legitimising state-linked oppression and securing the ground for profit and accumulation. The article concludes that while this social justice-engaged model will be essential for those moving into the new practice contexts resulting from defunding the police, it is also a model that will serve to strengthen the relevance and integrity of all social work practice.

During the era of neoliberalism, the nonprofit services sector has simultaneously been a site of (a) promarket restructuring and collective and individual resistance and (b) alternative forms of service delivery. Drawing on data collected as part of an ethnographic study in the Canadian nonprofit social services sector, this article explores the impacts of some of restructuring on professional, quasi-professional, and managerial employees in eight unionized, nonprofit social services. The data show that the adoption of social unionism has permitted some nonprofit social service workers to initiate new processes through which to have a voice in far-reaching social issues, sometimes in coalition with management and/or clients. The findings of this study point to the irrepressibility of the participatory spirit and its capacity to seek new forms and practices despite the stretched and restructured conditions of today's nonprofit social services sector.

In this article in the forum on Quantitative Indicators, the author questions the hegemony of statistical data as the basis for Canadian political, social, & economic decision-making to argue that current management models are paving the way for reliance on low-wage, temporary, & unpaid workers. A discussion of the management/worker/client dynamic in care work contextualizes a critical examination of the New Public Management (NPM) & other performance based management models that advance the priorities of budget-cutting & pro-market rationality, decrease client care & access. The perverse incentive to increase efficiency in public & nonprofit services is antithetical to increased profit is reflected in worker resistance to the NPM, & the complexities of the conflicting power structures described by Abu-Lughod. The author concludes that quantitative metrics in the social services expand bureaucracy & contribute the standardization of work, & the deskilling of the workforce. References. J. Harwell

New Public Management (NPM) has been adopted in a number of Canadian provinces. NPM is not merely a set of neutral and technical public management strategies, rather it is part of the creation of a minimalist, residual welfare state criss-crossed by pro-market, non-market practices. Drawing on themes emerging from original data gathered as part of a study of social service restructuring, this article elaborates some of the pro-market, non-market processes that dominate state-run and non-profit sections of the Canadian social services sector. Special attention is paid to two processes that have had unexpected but major impacts on the deskilling, disciplining and narrowing of social services work, namely the mandatory licensure and specialization of some workers.