Conditions for helping relations in specialized personal social services – a client perspective on the influence of organizational struc-ture

Pär Grell · Björn Blom · Nader Ahmadi

22 citations0/0 files storedNordic Social Work Research

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Social Work Education and Practice Public Policy and Administration Research Social Sciences and Policies

Abstract

This article highlights organizational structure as a factor influencing conditions for helping relations. It is based on a survey study and an interview study, both directed at parents in families that have parallel contacts in different parts of Swedish personal social services (PSS). The aim is to describe and analyse conditions for helping relations when clients with complex needs encounter specialized PSS.Low system trust, people processing dimensions of work, and an organizational and a professional emphasis on formal organizational structures and boundaries were found to constitute unfavourable conditions. Conversely, an occurrence of individual trust, people sustaining and people changing dimensions of work, as well as informal organization and individual social workers’ boundary spanning efforts, constituted favourable conditions. The article concludes that greater understanding of how clients are affected by contextual service conditions can give some pointers towards how to generally improve services for vulnerable and disadvantaged populations.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

References

2005Three Approaches to Qualitative Content Analysis 1977Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony 2003Qualitative content analysis in nursing research: concepts, procedures and measures to achieve trustworthiness 2002Qualitative research & evaluation methods 1981Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services 1997Interpreting Qualitative Data Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction 2007Researching the Vulnerable 1993Human Services as Complex Organizations.

Cited by

2021Perspectives on organizational structure and social services’ work with clients – a narrative review of 25 years research on social services 2020Structuration processes of client-oriented and system-oriented social work practice: the view point of client documentation 2022Formalist, Specialist, Pragmatist or Idealist—Approaches to Boundary Spanning in Personal Social Services 2021Creeping under the skin: manifestations of client violence towards social workers in Swedish individual and family services 2021

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.