Occupation Bedbug (or the Urgency and Agency of Professional Pragmatism) (original) (raw)
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The article analyses one case: a sickness benefit office in a social services department. It takes as a starting point that organisations function as projection surfaces for fantasies, emotions and reactions. The psycho-societal perspective clarifies how a social services department transfers a crucial dilemma in social work onto social workers by processes of individualising. The dilemma relates to the disparity between clients’ complex life situations and the limited possibilities for social workers to resolve them. There is an ambiguity in this transference. In cases of failure, management seeks explanations not by looking at possible organisational or societal restrictions or explanations, but rather at the social workers’ personal and professional life histories—they are subjected to a life historic individualisation and stigmatisation.1 Social workers, on the other hand, display ambivalence towards influencing case administrative work, which can be interpreted as an adequate defence mechanism. The article then introduces the concept of individualisation that reflects the dialectic processes of subjectivity and objectivity and leads to a contextualised analysis of social work.
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This article investigates how the identities of frontline professionals are (re)constructed in their talk about their everyday work activities. Based on a study of a mental health and addiction counselling service organization in Ontario, we illustrate that when talking about acting in accordance with their organizational policies, the social workers' identities are disciplined by and appropriated from addressing the practices of documentation and regular meetings with their supervisors that constitute the routine processes of organizing. However, when discussing instances where they override the organizationally sanctioned rules, their identities are disciplined by the aspiration of fabricating a client-centred caregiver identity adopted from the dominant discourse in their profession. We, therefore, counterbalance the understanding that professionals' identity work related to their deliberate micro-emancipation acts are merely an expression of agency and argue that their preferred resistant identities pertaining to their self-declared apparent deviation from the organizational order are also made within frameworks of disciplinary power. By delineating that both discursive conformity and resistance cut across the boundaries between acting in alignment with and against organizational guidelines, we unveil an underexplored complexity of conducting professional identity work associated with the interrelationships between practices of talk and action that has largely been overlooked in prior scholarship. We, therefore, offer an action-related analysis of discursive identity work that extends beyond the context of this study and informs future research.
Occupying Social Work: Unpacking the Social Work/Activist Divide.
We are interested in how social work and activism fit, connect and contradict each other. As academics, activists and social workers, we consistently grapple with the tensions between these realms and how we configure ourselves and our work into these spaces. This pilot project was initially undertaken by Emma, an undergraduate social work student, under the supervision of May, an assistant professor of social work, as a means of blending our diverse identities and subject positions while allowing us to analyze the relationships between social work and activism. We were able to use our own different roles and ideas as a jumping off point that led to Emma interviewing eight other people (who identified, variously, as social workers and/or activists), allowing for a rich and multifarious conversation to emerge. While neither social work nor activism nor any other form of protest and resistance can single-handedly engender utopia, this research has confirmed what our lived experiences have suggested: that individual connections, communities, social movements, educational models and radical alternatives must continue an engaged dialogue in order to constructively co-exist.