Social work professionals’ management of institutional and professional responsibilities at the micro-level of welfare-to-work

Abstract

Tensions between professional knowledge and values, and institutional rules and regulations in welfare-to-work practices targeting vulnerable clients have been well established. How these tensions are managed at the frontlines of welfare services is crucial for the effects on both clients’ and frontline workers’ own professional roles. However, we have little insight into the ways this is actually done in routine practice. Based on a micro-discursive analysis of 97 team meetings in 3 Danish municipalities, I examine how social work professionals manage their professional responsibilities within the institutional context of welfare-to-work. Findings suggest that team members enact a dual orientation to professional and institutional responsibilities, characterised by the shifting between professional and institutional discourses. Second, when a dual orientation cannot be managed, the institutional obligations overrule the professional ones. This is characterised by contrasting discourses and giving primacy to ‘documenting’ the case. The findings suggest that the question of how frontline workers manage institutional/professional tensions is less about an inherent opposition between institutional and professional rationales than a matter of the structured enactment of these rationales in interactions between professionals within the institutional complex.

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