The juxtaposition of doing ‘more with less’, and ‘being privileged to be a
community welfare worker’ gives some indication of the anomalies present in how
human service work is conceived and manifested. The contribution of this chapter is to
provide further knowledge and understanding of the nature, level and extent of paucity
management models to inform the way community welfare services (human services)
are delivered in rural communities. Paucity management relates to the way that
managers identify and utilise strategies to counter the anomaly of possessing a deep
philosophical underpinning in the value of community work, with the lack of means to
meet all the needs and expectations of community members.
Fifteen managers from the Central West Region of New South Wales in Australia were
asked to share work narratives about the way their activities contributed to sustaining their
communities (Mlcek, 2008). The research confirmed yet again that community services are
delivered strategically in spite of, or because of, a resource-poor environment that is mainly
punctuated by the non-availability of ever-decreasing funds (Mlcek, 2008). New ways of
seeking resources have resulted in managers and workers navigating competing priorities at
ground level, with trying to balance the tensions implicit in a directive provider-purchaser
work dynamic that has seen the evolvement of the hybrid government organisation. One of
several useful considerations addressed in this chapter relates to the ‘look’ of models of
paucity management and especially in relation to, how they were utilised to enable useful
engagement in an era of hybridisation.
Keywords: Community development, hybridisation, paucity management, automanagement,
innovative human service delivery, rural services
