Social work discourse and the social work interview

Abstract

This paper argues that we should beyond views of social work which highlight its role as either the provider of benevolent, professional care, or as the medium for the operation of negative, repressive forms of social control. Rather, it is best viewed as an element of productive governmental practices which create and operate within regimes of truth. These regimes identify and limit the objects, concerns and subject positions of key participants within practice. At root, social work mediates between the mass of established citizens and the excluded stigmatized minorities, both monitoring and judging the lives of clients and attempting to equip clients with the knowledge and skills for a self-regulating citizenship. Through an analysis of interview transcripts, the paper identifies the complex, indirect techniques involved in interview practice and some of the barriers to social work aims in the exchanges between textually based, professional discourses and residually oral based client discourses.

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