Constructing Clienthood in Social Work and Human Services

Interaction, Identities and Practices

Kirsi Juhila, Tarja Poso, Chris Hall, Nigel Parton

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9781843100737
• eBook ISBN:
  9781846424120
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Trabajo social

This innovative book explores social work, therapy and counselling as a series of encounters - between clients and human services professionals, social workers, their colleagues and other professionals, and more widely between citizens and the state. Providing a variety of social constructionist perspectives on the idea of the 'client', it presents in-depth discussion of the roles, language and contexts of meetings between social workers and their clients.

International contributors present discussion on categorization, analysing identities and reflexive practice. Drawing data from a variety of sources, including meetings, client files and transcribed dialogues with clients, the book employs methods such as conversation and discourse analysis to propose new insights into what it means to be a client of the human services agency.

Bringing together a rich variety of data, this volume forms an important contribution to major debates on the nature of social work and counselling. As well as innovative approaches to theory and research, the implications for practice in social work and counselling are discussed. Challenging previously-held notions about clienthood, this book is a useful and thought-provoking resource for social workers, counsellors, policy makers, academics, researchers and students and trainers in social work and counselling.

1

Introduction

Beyond a Universal Client

Kirsi Juhila, Tarja Pösö, Christopher Hall
and Nigel Parton

The client in social work

The client is at the core of social work. The debate on social work, whether focusing on the profession, ethics, politics and ideology or research, inevitably takes a stand on what is called the client-citizen. This client-citizen is considered if not the only, then at least an essential target of and motive for, social work. The same applies to other human service professions. Their basis lies in the actors who use and need them. The practices and methods of social work may be defined through the client even to the point of being described as client centred. When this is the case, the aim is to underline that the client, as the partner of the social worker, has a guiding role for the content of social work. Such client centredness has become a self-evident ideal for social work. Good social work starts out from the client and the client’s needs, and bad social work is understood as the opposite of this, as a work approach which makes the client into an object.

The tendency to define social work as good or bad, drawing the attention to the position of social work in relation to the client, omits to problematize the question of who or what the client is in concrete social work terms. This has prompted criticism of the client concepts in social work. It has been stressed that an abstract client does not exist, but the process or event of becoming a client is determined in social, cultural and economic terms. For this reason, attention must primarily be paid to the mechanisms and processes which create clienthoods. The client, just as the subject in general, is socially constituted (Leonard 1997, pp.32–60). It has been emphasized that clienthoods are intertwined with such factors as gender, race, ethnic identity, social class and age. It has also been noted that the condition of being a client is only one factor determining an individual’s life. In addition to clienthood, there exist many positions or actions which are meaningful for the individual and have often more significance than clienthood. In the client discussion which approaches the issue through the meanings of the actors and actions, more and more attention is paid to a scrutiny based on narratives and the client’s life history. Clienthood is to be understood and interpreted in relation to the client’s previous life, and at the same time it is emphasized that the individual her- or himself positions the role of client in her or his life history (e.g. Parton and O’Byrne 2000). In this context it is significant that the so-called client and the worker together discuss the meanings of clienthood. Clienthood is not accepted as given, but as situational and narrative states and interpretations, and being so, they may be subject to change. Thus, the client is multiple, not something that can be reduced to a single abstract category.

The same multiplicity of the client is visible in the institutional and administrative environment of social work. The identity of modern social work has been strongly linked to welfare state systems, which is why the emphases and changes in these systems are also reflected in the clienthood of social work (Chambon and Irving 1999). In child protection, the client is not understood in the same way as in social work which focuses, say, on poverty. The clients of child protection are the child and its parents in a mutual interaction and care relationship. In issues related to livelihood, the person interpreted as client is often an adult whose life management is examined by social work, particularly from the point of view of daily coping (e.g. Forsberg 1998). Institutional routines also differentiate clients, beginning from decisions on who is entered as client in the information systems of each organization and what basic data is entered about them.

In social work research the client has been very much a focus of differing conceptual standpoints. This can clearly be seen in textbooks written as introductions to various theories underlying social work. One example of this is David Howe’s An Introduction to Social Work Theory (1996) which summarizes the way in which different theoretical strands of debate have defined, explained and positioned the client. For instance, psychoanalytical theory conceptualizes the client and simultaneously also social work through the client’s internal, partly subconscious, world. This interpretation is clearly different from, say, behaviourist approaches or radical social work, in which the client is understood through external behaviour or socioeconomic structures and the focus of change work lies in the client’s behaviour or the immediate socio-economic life situation. More important than the client concepts of individual schools of thought in this context is the fact that they all contain and create interpretations of clienthood and may diverge significantly. Thus, social work theories also produce multiplicity.

An important element in the debate on the client of social work comes from critical research, which emphasizes the control and management aspect of social work and thus discredits its ‘innocence’ (Chambon and Irving 1999). To take an example, Amy Rossiter (2001) writes how, as a social work teacher, she grapples with the problem of trying to find a client-centred locus of innocence which can be taught as the correct direction for social work. Finding a direction is made more difficult by the understanding that social work always also involves managing and categorizing people in order to control a range of deviations and to make people compatible with the outlooks of institutions based on normalizing people. Thus, categorization is often negative and based on the definition of shortcomings and problems. This places the social workers hierarchically above the client and allows them to manage the shortcomings and problems of the clients.

However, Rossiter (2001) does not remain imprisoned in a black-and-white, either-or approach. She is of the opinion that there also exists a middle ground in social work. The solution is to make social workers conscious of their participation in governmentality and of the problems related to their own identity. In this way it is possible to identify not only one’s own controlling power but also other types of client-worker encounters and moments of categorization. Thus, our interest is turned to the everyday practices of social work in which client categories are produced, maintained, modified and broken. These practices also form the focus of this book. Through a study of various practices we attempt to provide multiple answers to the question of who and what the client of social work is, that is, we seek to go beyond a universal client.

The individual becomes a client of social work when he or she enters or is forced to enter into a relationship with a social worker and an organization carrying out social work. Clienthood may be based on a face-to-face relationship but it may also be situated more vaguely, such as in shared ways of understanding the client in local organization cultures (Jokinen et al. 1999). These bodies, organizations and social workers, are present in this book, although in the background. Our gaze is now directed expressly to the client. There exists a lively debate and research concerning the institutional place of social work and the social worker, concerning the differences between societies and cultures, concerning educational and support systems etc., but there is clearly less research which attempts to position the client conceptually and empirically. Bringing the client on to the agenda of empirical research in social work is the essential task of this book.

Terminological pressures

Parallel with the ongoing debate on the multiplicity of clienthood in social work there has been a focus on the use of language. The concept of client has attracted negative connotations and has been regarded as stigmatized by social work approaches which deny the client’s autonomy. Especially in Britain, alternative concepts have been searched for which would bring greater equality to the activity and autonomy of the citizen as client than does the word client. However, language is always bound with a culture, and in Finland, for example, the word generally used for client does not carry particularly negative connotations. In fact, in certain contexts it is considered progressive, so that within recent memory it has been debated whether social work related to health care has clients or patients. However, certain sectors in Finland, too, particularly those related to direct benefits, have introduced other concepts besides that of the client (such as applicant, beneficiary, etc.). In particular, the concepts of service user and consumer have been suggested as alternatives to client. The choice between these is significant, as they refer to different relationships and also reflect different ethical commitments. ‘Service user’ is well suited to describing clienthood in the welfare state, based on social rights. A ‘service user’ is a fully empowered citizen who, thanks to this position, may expect and demand services of a certain kind and level. ‘Consumer’, on the other hand, refers more to a person active in the ‘social services market’, who chooses the service with the best price/quality ratio (see Niiranen 2002; Banks 1995). Changing the concept also changes the meaning, which is why these changes may confuse issues. For instance, ‘service user’ – even though it emphasizes activity and autonomy – primarily refers to the universal social services accessible to all citizens, and is less well suited to the kind of ‘marginal social work’ which is strongly needs based and/or which contains the possibility and obligation of compulsory measures. To some extent, this is an issue related to the general change in human services terminology: we also speak of judicial services and police services in such contexts as violence between couples (Nyqvist 2001). These are defined as ‘service’ from the point of view of one of the parties, but as ‘control’ from that of the other.

The pressures towards new vocabulary in social work do not arise out of nothing. They are linked to broader societal changes and the academic debates analysing these. This broader context has been described in some texts as a move to the late or reflexive modern society (Beck et al. 1994; Giddens 1991 ). Late modernity is characterized as an era of individualization, during which the self has become a reflexive project. There are no clear pathways or rules to follow throughout the course of one’s life, but people continuously encounter different choices and decisions. Harry Ferguson (2001; see also Karisto 1997) writes that the task of social work in the late modern society is to act as a resource for the individual self projects and life planning, to empower people by promoting their opportunities of self-actualization. We are dealing here with a citizen-based life politics, with which the social work tradition, based on guiding the client towards a certain set way of life, is poorly compatible. The viewpoint emphasizes a clienthood based on activity and autonomy, and a vocabulary which is compatible with this.

The pressure towards changing the vocabulary of social work can be placed into another societal context and the research commenting on this as well. What we are dealing with here is a neo-liberal spirit of the times based on both economic arguments and individualism. On the one hand, markets, entrepreneurship, profit, competition and efficiency are emphasized, on the other the responsibility of individuals themselves and that of collectives other than the welfare state (Julkunen 2001, pp.163–164). Welfare state benefits and the way of life of those who do not meet the criteria for people active in the markets are evaluated in an increasingly rigid and controlling manner. At the same time, social work is pushed into the margin as a controlling profession run by the state, in which the client is defined as a dependent and passive object. Opinions have been voiced in Britain that as a result, the public image of social work has been so badly tarnished that new names must be sought for many activities which could otherwise happily be called social work; among the alternatives are ‘projects’ and ‘project workers’ (Jordan and Jordan 2000). In Finland, Britain and elsewhere one can discern attempts to replace social work by the labels and practices of case management, for instance, which serves as a means of transferring tasks to other than social work actors. Simultaneously this helps to interpret the educational qualifications of practitioners less rigidly. This may lead to a situation where the activity termed social work is narrowed down and stigmatized as a profession which carries out control and co-ordination tasks, defined in detail by law, which will also produce a very limited understanding of the client.

Constructionist approaches to clienthood

All in all it is hardly wrong to say that the notion of the client is in a state of change. There are many ways in which social work reformulates the conceptual and operational approaches to the social worker’s ‘partner’. The present book brings its own angle to this discussion. We will highlight the ways of understanding the client of social work and human services from the viewpoint of one research tradition, that of social constructionism. Doing this, we are rejecting an abstract and universal concept of the client and instead asking from an interactive angle how the client is constructed in the various encounters within social work. Constructionism stresses a negotiable clienthood instead of an universal one. The client is not a client all the time. This is why we must speak of clienthoods, separated from the individual.

A commitment to the idea of negotiable clienthood means that the focus of the book is on action. We are interested in what takes place in the practices of social work and in the broader sense of human service work when clienthoods are negotiated, that is, how social workers’ partners are produced. We understand practices in a broad sense. The reality of social work and the way in which it is continuously being constructed is present wherever it is spoken or written into being: when encountering clients, when speaking or writing of them. In the chapters of this book these practices become data which are used to interpret the processes of social reality in which multiple clienthoods are constructed.

The research tradition of social constructionism stresses precisely action as a significant research topic (Burr 1995; Gergen 1994; Holstein and Miller 1993a; Potter 1996). The phenomena to be studied do not self-evidently exist in a given manner ‘out there’, simply waiting for the researcher to come along and report on them. Instead of being inert, the research topic continues to evolve. Thus, each set of data – whether interview, conversation or text – is in continuous movement. It is the researcher’s task to analyse this movement and present it as like a film: what stages are taken by the characters in the film, what roles they do assume, what relationships the roles have with each other, how the story unfolds (see Goffman 1959). The completed film, the research report, can only contain some of the material collected. The researcher always makes interpretative choices, but still the purpose is to present the processes which are essential for the question being studied and which produce social reality.

Social constructionism, especially in the ethnomethodologically tuned traditions presented in this book, deals with the study of interaction: movement is created by the mutual action of people. Social reality is something that people construct together. When meeting each other on whatever stage people talk with each other, agree, argue and disagree. In other words, they negotiate social reality and construct interpretations of it. A monologue, i.e. a speech or text by one person only, is also interactive, an interpretation of social reality always produced for a reason and always spoken or written for someone. The study of interaction from the angle of constructing social reality brings into focus the use of language. Thus social constructionism is placed in the framework of the so-called linguistic turn of social and humanist research. The turn had the result that language, speech and text, was no longer understood only as a tool for describing reality, but as action which produces reality in and by itself. Bringing linguistic practices into the focus does not, however, mean that the other elements of human encounters – physical locations, gestures, expressions etc. – are no longer important. Constructionist research is interested in the overall context of interaction.

Social work includes many different stages for interaction where the actors meet. The work is carried out by a range of organizations specializing in different problems – neglect and abuse of children, substance addictions, mental health problems, regional deprivation, poverty, homelessness, etc. Clienthood has its links with the organization and also with the service system in the sense of what organizations and experthoods there are on offer and available. The special fields of these organizations determine the roles which clients and social workers may assume on each stage in relation to each other. In other words, in the organizational sense, the contexts open up different actor positions and thus also call up different clienthoods (see Gubrium and Holstein 2001; Hall 1997; Holstein and Miller 1993b; Juhila and Pösö 2000). This does not, however, signify that the client positions in organizations would be completely defined and simply waiting for someone to fill them. The actors evoke the roles in their interaction, and many variations are possible. Variations are produced by many factors, such as narratives which are recounted by people themselves or attached to client histories through various client documents and which thus become part of the interaction, or previous encounters between the actors and meanings constructed through age, gender and race. Thus, clienthoods are always ultimately produced in local negotiation. This is why it is necessary to study in detail the practices in which this negotiation takes place and to present interpretations on how the partners together construct the realities and clienthoods of social work.

Social work research based on social constructionism may be regarded as a methodical direction which contributes to the debate on the locus of knowledge related to social work expertise. Nigel Parton (2000) has defined social work as a professional practice in which uncertainty, complexity and doubt are continuously present. The reverse of this is what creates the strength of social work: the capability of a dialogical and interpretative approach. A similar approach to work has been defended in other human service professions as well, especially in therapy (McLeod 1997; McNamee and Gergen 1992; Miller 1997). Social work expertise, dealing with many kinds of people, situations and personal problems, cannot be reduced to the application of external theories, empirically tested work methods or legislation. Instead, expertise is about local negotiations, which use different narratives to organize and articulate ‘messy’ issues together with clients and other professionals. In this sense, we are dealing with a locally constructed knowledge, in social work literature called by various names, including ‘practice’ or ‘tacit knowledge’. Some even speak of practice theory (e.g. Fook 2002; Pease and Fook 1999). In our opinion, this local knowledge, its construction and use can be made visible by the tools of constructionist research, by asking, among other things, how knowledge of clienthood is constructed in social work practices.

Constructionist ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Transcription Symbols
• 1 Kirsi Juhila, Tarja Pösö, University of Tampere, Finland, Christopher Hall and Nigel Parton, University of Huddersfield, UK
• Part I: Constructing Client Identities and Morals
• Part II: Categorizing and Negotiating Clienthoods
• Part III: Client Work in Professional Contexts
• References
• The Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index