Accounting for IT-based use of information in emergency social work encounters

Abstract

This article studies how the use of information, meaning checking, recording and transferring of information, particularly related to the use of information technologies (IT), are talked and accounted for in office-based encounters between emergency social workers and their clients. The core research data consists of eight video recorded and observed encounters. In addition, wider ethnographic material collected in the emergency services provides contextualizing background knowledge for the study. In the context of emergency social work services, the different practices of transferring, recording and retrieving information across agencies are emphasized, since the emergency social work agency and the regular social services work at different hours and at a distance from one another. The analysis shows how the workers on emergency duty explain and open their actions and institutional practices related to the use of information in different ways. It also shows how they justify and excuse the problems related to them. The analysis allows us to perceive how the emergency social workers handle and use information provisionally, in a way that it does not actually belong to them, but in some other instances. It is concluded that in the emergency services, the accounting for one's actions may even be emphasized because the clients are unknown to workers, and the assessments and decisions about the cases have to be made fast and in-situ using various kinds of information technologies with different partners in cooperation.

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