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Examining the concepts underpinning the reasoning processes of social worker's decision‐making provides important insights into how social work practice is undertaken. This paper examines one of the major discourses used by social workers in decision reasoning in a non‐governmental organization child protection context in Aotearoa/New Zealand: family maintenance. This study found that family maintenance as a concept was strongly privileged by social workers. This resulted in attempts to preserve families and created a hierarchy of preferred decision outcomes. A preference for family maintenance was supported by legal, moral, psychological and Māori cultural concepts. This pattern of constructs underpinned the ‘weighing up of harms’ when considering removal, and generally reflected a child welfare orientation. In addition to this, it was found that ‘family’ was broadly defined, and could include people who had a relationship with the children, or Māori definitions of extended family, in addition to legal ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of call centre operations in public and private sectors is a notable development in the changing structure and nature of employment worldwide. This trend is clearly evident in the South Pacific with the establishment of a call centre as the official point of entry for the statutory child protection systems in both New Zealand and New South Wales. As sites of professional practice however call centres are a controversial development. This paper discusses the practice findings of a qualitative research project which explored the particularity of intake social work (ISW) with 14 social workers employed at the Child Youth and Families' (CYF) National Contact Centre (NCC) in New Zealand. Findings were established through semi structured interviews and thematic analysis. They reveal a unique practice combining attributes of social work and emergency communication services in a workplace environment subject to similar output requirements as those found in commercial call centres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]