Practising Freedom and Control: An Introduction

Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to the fourth part of the book, which looks at how discretion is applied and experienced in often complex, dynamic and challenging situations of practices in public services. For public service workers, particularly professionals, discretion is seen as synonymous with who they are and the work they do. However, the nature of discretion is not fixed but varies, depending on the intersection of notions of knowledge and relations of power that obtain for particular professions in specific situations. While discretion can be characterized as a negative phenomenon, to be contained and constrained by a proliferation of rules, a strong theme of this part of this edited collection is that it can have a positive role as a solution to key challenges that inhere in human services.