Chapter 9

Each student will select one question to answer. You must include the page number in the book which assisted you with your answer. Each student will comment on two of their peers responses. No two students may answer the same question.

1. Review Policy Advocacy Challenge 9.2, pp. 291-295. Identify various kinds of power resources (including person-to person, substantive, process, and procedural ones) that the social worker plans to use to secure the adoption of the service innovation.

2. What does Policy Advocacy Challenge 9.2 tell us about the power of low-level persons within agencies—in this case, the student intern who wants the agency to adopt a specific innovation? What constraints, as well as opportunities, stemmed from the low position that the intern occupied in the agency?

3. Referring to Policy Advocacy Challenge 9.2, discuss the exercising of power by indirection, for example, by using third parties.

4. Discuss the assertion that people with an analytic or technical style of policy-making have falsely given politics a “bad rep.” What are some positive or necessary functions of politics within agencies, communities, and societies?

5. Discuss the assertion that skillful policy practitioners recognize the many kinds of power resources that exist, thus expanding their options in specific situations.

6. Contrast person-to-person and substantive power resources. Contrast each of these kinds of power resources with power that works by indirection (e.g., efforts to shape outcomes through procedural, process, and context-shaping strategies).

7. How does “power” differ from “force”?

8. Discuss the assertion that line workers often obtain power by using their autonomy.

9. Discuss the assertion that discretion, compliance, and whistleblowing are interrelated concepts.

10. Discuss the positive uses of whistleblowing. Also discuss how it might be abused or used unethically.

11. Discuss how policy practitioners often need to be relatively assertive, but how a victim mentality and fatalism often make people excessively passive in specific situations

12. Discuss how direct-service staff and often participate in the politics of their agencies even though they lack formal power, or authority, of higher-level staff