Social Work and Organisational Change in Nigeria’s Public Welfare Institutions: A Critical Institutional Analysis

Public welfare institutions in Nigeria are characterised by institutional inertia, resource constraints, and organisational cultures that consistently undermine professional social work practice, yet the mechanisms through which institutional change in these settings occurs or is blocked remain theoretically underexplored. This doctoral study undertakes a critical institutional analysis of organisational change processes in Nigerian public welfare institutions, drawing on multi-site data from welfare agencies in Kaduna, Enugu, and Lagos States. A critical realist paradigm employing institutional ethnography and neo-institutional theory underpins the study, combining 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork across three welfare agencies, 60 practitioner interviews, and institutional document analysis. Institutional ethnography, critical discourse analysis, and comparative case analysis are applied. The study's original theoretical contribution is the Welfare Institution Change Mechanism Model, which identifies eight institutional mechanisms, including professional boundary disputes, resource dependency, managerial isomorphism, and practitioner resistance, that interact to produce or obstruct organisational change in Nigerian welfare agencies. The study makes an original empirical contribution by documenting, for the first time, the lived experience of organisational change from the perspective of frontline social workers in Nigerian public welfare institutions, generating a practitioner theory of welfare system transformation. Keywords: organisational change, public welfare institutions, institutional theory, social work, critical analysis