Reimagining the Human Service Relationship

Jaber Gubrium, Tone Andreassen, Per Solvang

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231541787
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialarbeit

The traditional lines of demarcation between service providers and service users are shifting. Professionals in managed service organizations are working to incorporate the voices of service users into their missions and the way they function, and service users, with growing access to knowledge, have taken on the semblances of professional expertise. Additionally, the human services environment has been transformed by administrative imperatives. The drive toward greater efficiency and accountability has weakened the bond between users and providers.

Reimagining the Human Service Relationship is informed by the premise that the helping relationship should be seen as developing in the interactive space between those who provide human services and those who receive them. The contributors to this volume redefine the contours, roles, institutional divisions, means, and aims of providing and receiving services in a range of settings, including child welfare, addiction treatment, social enterprise, doctoring, mental health, and palliative care. Though they advocate an experience-near approach, they remain sensitive to the ambiguities and competing rationalities of the service relationship. Taken together, these chapters reimagine the service relationship by making visible the working relevancies of service delivery.

PART

The Human Service Relationship

WHAT IS THE HUMAN SERVICE RELATIONSHIP? Chapter 1 presents its interactional terrain as a distinctive social form. The chapter starts by describing how contemporaries Max Weber and Franz Kafka in the 1920s imagined the divisions, roles, and regulations that were to become the organizational nexus of professional service provision. Weber worried that the bureaucratic mediation of human service was eclipsing its moral bearings. Kafka offered a frightening portrait of the segregation of outsiders. With the images of Weber and Kafka lurking in the background, the chapter goes on to discuss the service relationship as it expanded rapidly in the decades following World War II, when human service provision became highly specialized, credentialed, and proprietary. Centered on issues of knowledge, skill, and autonomy, debate over the position and scope of professionalism was heated. Moving beyond formal organization and turning to the everyday logics of troubles and problems, Chapter 1 features the contrasting practice of the service relationship, contending that what Weber and Kafka imagined nearly a century ago and still lingers in thinking about service organization can be reimagined and realized in alternative terms.

From the Iron Cage to Everyday Life

JABER F. GUBRUM

ERVING GOFFMAN (1983) ARGUED FORCEFULLY that human relations transpire in a domain of their own, with diverse subjectivities, sentiments, and strategies for action. The domain is influenced by personality and social structure, but it is not determined by them. Positioned at the public margins of inner life, personality presents itself, in Goffman’s (1959) view, as a function of judgments strategically communicated in sites of interaction. Situated outside of inner life, structures such as governments and institutions are in continuous need of local articulation in what Dorothy Smith terms the experience-near “relations of ruling” (Smith 1987). Influential images and ideas of what these structures are and intend play out in the contingencies of practice. Uneasy with experience-distant perspectives, Goffman (1983) called the domain the “interaction order,” which is the relational context central to the concerns of this book.

In an era of hyperindividualism, it is easily forgotten that we experience life in relationships. From the relations of family living and schooling to the relations of work and retirement and the relations of sickness and care, relationships deploy ways of being and prompt directions for action. Relationships are ever present in life, mediating identities as much in the flow of interaction as in the personal monitoring of thought and feeling. Relational worlds and relational sequences—first parental, then educational, and later occupational—provide life with substance and patterning, giving shape to experience through time and space. While some would claim that individual identity is a fundamental presence in life, in practice, who and what we are are socially constructed, with manifold identities being formed in the process (Mead 1934).

Increasingly prevalent today is the organized service relationship. It is the kind of relationship that leads the way in turning troubles into problems and discerning pathways for intervention and recovery (Gubrium and Järvinen 2014). The service relationship is professionally mixed and institutionally diverse. It varies from the relations of doctoring, nursing, and physical therapy to the relations of counseling, social service, and personal assistance. The relationship is as wide-ranging in context as the differences between solo practice and corporate management. More and more, it is a relationship that is mixed in its values, as the logic of administrative accountability and efficiency operates alongside the logics of service and care (Gill 2012; and see Jensen and Villadsen, Chapter 11, this volume).¹ As Everett Hughes pointed out decades ago, contemporary experience, especially its troubles, is being drawn through and rendered actionable by a sundry world of “going concerns” (Hughes 1984 [1957]).

This book deals with that relationship as it functions in the interaction between service providers and service users. It is concerned with state and institutional policies as far as they bear on the ordinary practice of that relationship. It does not feature a specific sector such as doctoring, nursing, or social work but rather approaches the service relationship as a social form in its own right, opening its borders, actors, and logics to critical scrutiny and reconsideration. While individual chapters have points of departure in particular national contexts and organizational venues, all proceed with an eye toward recognizing the fluid complexity of the service relationship and, on that basis, what it can mean to provide and receive just and humane service and care for all concerned across the board.

IMAGE OF THE IRON CAGE

Forever lurking around the service relationship is a troubling image of organizations, official insiders, and their connection with outsiders that Max Weber nearly a century ago likened to an iron cage.² The image persists to this day and is quietly ominous in the chapters of this book, even while organization theory is now highly variegated in its metaphorical bearings (Alvesson 2012; Gabriel 2000; Gubrium and Holstein 2001; Hatch 2012; Morgan 1985; Reed and Hughes 1992; Silverman 1970). The image depicts rigid rules of interaction, an unsparing application of official responsibility, and a sharp demarcation of the separateness of outsiders and the transparency of their circumstances. Weber focused on the inner borders of officialdom, while his literary contemporary Franz Kafka portrayed the borders of access for outsiders.³

As administrative imperatives increasingly influence the service relationship, it is instructive in this introductory chapter to begin with Weber’s and Kafka’s portrayals. Noteworthy is the dismal future they foresee for the relationship. This calls on us to imagine something different but invisible in what Weber and Kafka wrote about. In what follows, I deliberately dwell on pertinent texts of theirs as a way of communicating their portrayals’ deeply emotional contours—what it feels like on all sides to be caught in the web of the iron cage—which continues to raise hackles, resentment, and calls for action.

Inner Borders

Weber was distressed by the increasing rationalization of contemporary life, the ideal form of which he described as bureaucratically organized. He viewed modernity as rooted in the rationalization process. In his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1985 [1930]), Weber drew linkages between the ascetic ethic of Puritanism, capitalist accumulation, and modern organization. Guided spiritually by tenets designed to achieve maximum efficiency, unbridled accumulation, and ultimately salvation, the actors Weber envisioned fashioned rules of rational production, which informed and bound the very actions that produced them, generating his infamous iron cage. If Weber’s prose was characteristically neutral and systematic, the metaphor he applied accompanies enduring anguish over what he sought to understand.

Maximally efficient rationality is concisely described in Weber’s principles of bureaucracy. He sharpens the description by contrasting it with what he idealizes as a premodern form of social organization. Modern capitalist organization’s ironclad and global inevitability is compared nostalgically with a long-lost form of moral order capable of “throw[ing] aside [such confining encumbrances] at any moment like a light cloak”:

When [Puritan] asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force…. [Rather than being able to throw this aside at any moment like a light cloak], fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (Weber 1985:181)

This appears to be the only place in Weber’s voluminous writing where he used the iron-cage metaphor. If seeming to be a passing trope, it nonetheless has become standard usage for principles of organization that Weber simultaneously figured to be pernicious.

The principles are presented in a section of his book Economy and Society (1968 [1922]) titled “Characteristics of Modern Bureaucracy.” The first of Weber’s six principles is the “principle of official jurisdictional areas” (Weber 1968:956). Fixed rules govern the range of official activities. Weber explains that “the authority to give the commands required for the discharge of [official] duties is distributed in a stable way and is strictly delimited by rules concerning the coercive means, physical, sacerdotal, or otherwise, which may be placed at the disposal of officials” (p. 956).

Weber’s second principle is the “principle of office hierarchy and of channels of appeal [that] stipulate a clearly established system of super- and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by the higher ones” (p. 957). This applies to all modern bureaucracies, both private and public. Control and accountability are top-down, not bottom-up, in other words.

The third principle refers to “the management of the modern office, [which] is based upon written documents (the ‘files’), which are preserved in their original or draft form, and upon a staff of subaltern officials and scribes of all sorts” (p. 957). The modern office is not governed by random application of rules, nor does it abide discretion, but instead operates in terms of written and stable guidelines.

The fourth principle deals with the education of officials, which “usually presupposes thorough training in a field of specialization” (p. 958). Official posts are not filled helter-skelter from an available labor market but draw from pertinent expertise, again regardless of whether the bureaucracy is private or public.

Fifth is the principle of “full working capacity” (p. 958). This refers, in the first instance, to the full on the job separation of the public and private lives of occupants. In the second instance, the principle rests on the understanding that the maximum efficiency of modern bureaucracy stems from work time that is purely engaged with organizational, not personal, goals and commitments.

And, finally, Weber’s sixth principle is “the management of the office follows general rules, which are more or less stable, more or less exhaustive, and which can be learned” (p. 958). The rules apply regardless of circumstances. Ideally, there is no room for compromise, only straightforward execution.

According to Weber, the principles are exhaustive and are applicable without exception; deviation hampers maximum efficiency Practice is subject to principle, in other words, not the other way around. The concept of frontline discretion, eloquently described by Michael Lipsky (1980) in his book Street-Level Bureaucracy, would be a form of border disruption tantamount to a violation of assigned authority and designated hierarchy. There is no indication that the modern relationship Weber portrays could be otherwise in his idealized scheme of things, such that practice instead is foundational, and principle is applied locally and strategically for everyday purposes.

Oddly enough, the first to express frustration and a desire for something different—a reimagination, if you will—was Weber himself. He lamented principles that turned officials into mere cogs of efficient organization, whirling with disenchantment away from traditional values such as trust, care, collaboration, and gratitude, losing touch with people’s basic humanity. Referencing J. P. Mayer (1943), biographer Reinhard Bendix (1960) quotes Weber berating the bureaucrat, a role that the chapters of this book show is more complex in practice than Weber could (or would dare to) imagine (see Barnes, Chapter 15, this volume):

It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones—a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever-increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative system, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy…is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics…we were deliberately to become men who need “order” and nothing but order, who become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. (Bendix 1960:464)

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