Operation D: Creating a work relationship, an alliance – dialogue and meeting point (operations 11, relationship 1)

Social work is about relationships. And, social work is a relationship. A special relationship – a work relationship and alliance. Social work is about people coming together in order to perform meaningful changes in their lives. Hence, it is a working relationship, alliance of doing.

However, before the work starts, there needs to be an idea about what to do. This idea needs to reflect one’s inner and outer reality and needs to be reflexive to the events and contingencies of one’s Life-World. It also has to be utopian – bringing about something that there is not, but at the same time pragmatic enough to be workable. In deed, it has to be operative, conceived how it is to be done. It has to form an arch from the insight based on reflexion to doing thing, to work and change.

Dialogue

The most important tool in doing that, and probably in social work generally, is the dialogue. The dialogue does not mean the conversation of two people, the prefix “dia—“does not stand for “two” but for “through”. Dialogue literally means talking (and thinking) through (the matter). Enunciating what is to become.

In Freirean terms, the dialogue is a way to see through the material forces, it is a way of including people, being in cahoots with them in this gaze, seeing what there is going to be. Dialogue is a way of rendering the social arrangements into a material (reducing substance to matter) in order to transform them. Just like love was, for that man, a reason to dress better.

Dialogue means to establish a safe space where it is possible to say things, to name the world in order to change it (Freire, 1972).  It means establishing a “theoretical” (thinking) contexts”, in which concrete context of the lived world can be represented and decoded; and where new codes can be produced which can lead the action in the real context.

The necessary prerequisite for working together is to meet, establish the contact. Social work users are usually being referred to social work practitioners by other services or fellow users, who detect that there might be a social work issue, they often come on their own initiative “to sort something out” be it a simple social benefit or the complexity of life. Not seldom, however, it is also social work task to “seek” the user, as it is the case when it is due to perceived danger a statutory or a moral obligation.

In any case, they have to meet and this usually means, since the social work is not repairing or making “things” but dealing with human, personal and existential matters, that it is an encounter of the two human beings. This may not be important when the common task is a simple one, but is of virtual importance when dealing with rearranging the “whole life”. There a mere professional trust is not sufficient; the authentic human trust must be developed. Actors need to get to know each other, and this should be a two-way, mutual process (with more or less symmetry). A social worker also needs to learn about the person in the situation, acquire “user’s perspective”, realise the strengths of the person. A user needs to know the social worker not only in terms of what he or she has to offer, to get a sketchy idea of how the social work operates, what are the resources on disposal, but also how he or she experiences a kind of distress the user presents, what are his or her attitudes and values. Employing the strength perspective is important since it is about sharing the values. For common work, common value base is needed.

Meeting place

The meeting point should, in principle, be half-way between the two Life-Worlds. It may be handy of a social worker to meet in his or her office, but, however, might not be the user’s perspective. Although social work office should be in principle a safe space, a space where one can express his anxieties, worries, desires and … this may not be seen so by the user; he or she may experience it as an alien territory, somebody else’s turf, feel constrained by assumed or actual rules (e.g. no smoking) and by expectations how to behave.

Meeting in user’s home environment turns this perspective around, not only the user feels at home and is the host, and the power differential is slimmer, but also social worker meets and gets to know the user in the situation, not only his abstract persona but also its material and immaterial extensions.

Meeting on the neutral territory, often a public space (a café, park, town square) is also a good option, especially in the beginning. Not only it is free of burden of institutional expectations or domestic stipulation but it also enables an encounter that can be primae facie an exchange of equals.

Often institutional space other than social worker’s is used by necessity (a hospital, prison, old age home). In these cases a niche should be sought that would allow a personal encounter, a proxy for home, office or a public space – allowing privacy, equity and sovereignty.

Reference:

Freire, P. (1972), Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Books.

Operation A: Alerts in investigating the Life-World and enabling the access to the resources (operations 4, life-world 3)

After outlining the basics of the operation of investigating the Life-World and enabling the access to the resources, we need to look what can go wrong – what are the traps and pitfalls we can encounter when performing this operation.

Enabling not restricting the access

While enabling access to resources was a prime task of social work in the abundance of welfare state, the social workers, under the ideology and regime of austerity, tend to be pushed into a role of “custodian of public resources”, a watchdog of public expenditure, their curtailing, if not denying, the access to welfare provision. Social workers have few ways available to withstand such pressures and to adapt to new circumstances without jeopardising the basic definition of their calling.

In this context especially, the mobilisation of the resources dormant in one’s Life-World, must not be seen as saving public money, but as a value in itself. The community response is usually more adequate, use of the community resources increases one’s participation, and mobilisation of community resources can be seen as a  contribution (by usually marginal members) to the common good. Mobilisation of own resources, reclaiming them and recovering the common ground also enhances people’s autonomy from the authority and diminishes the dependence on the public but alienated resources.

Eliciting the desires not “ticking boxes”

This operation is a dialectic whole, combining two highly heterogeneous parts – one very human, actual, the other abstract, mechanical. The art is not only how to fit them without the more robust and powerful colonializing the more fine and subjective actuality, but also not to lose one on the account of the other. It does happen in everyday social work practice that a practitioner would concentrate on the exploring the Life-World while neglecting the access to resources elsewhere. Exploring the Life-World without employing this knowledge in claiming the rights is not only voyeuristic but also not productive, sterile (even if interesting). Basically, this omission not only deprives a person of his or her rights, it perpetuates the control mechanisms of psychological kind. On the other hand, insistence on purely procedural, bureaucratic operation, denies people subjectivity, their actual life, even more it is a means of its colonialization.

Using check-lists and ticking boxes according to the presumed categories is not exploring Life-World, but imposing the extraneous logic (bureaucratic) and alien ideas (what is needed, what are basic needs etc.) onto it, thus killing the meanings inherent to the Life-World, personal and group priorities and hierarchies of desire.

Similarly, the pre-set provision might determine the desires and goals by their existence and strong offer. The “fridge logic”, which makes us wish to eat what is in the fridge, can (and must) be overcome by firmly grounding the desire in the Life-World. And only then look what there is on offer, how does it fit the desire, and if it does not, create a new tailor-made response, also by using external to Life-World funds, if needed.

User perspective

Life-World notion in approaching the issue of the resources, and also of great use in other operation introduces what is often called “user perspective”. The imperative is to see the situation and its change with the eyes of the person who is beneficiary of the action. To actively and purposely adopt the perspective of the other is important because otherwise service or other kind provision will be misplaced, misunderstood by both parties. Looking from the side of the provider is basically different to that from the recipient. Definition of the situation by the care personnel in a residential facility when serving lunch to a bed-ridden resident is to clean the table, serve the meal and clean the dishes off the table. Putting things that the resident needs to reach back on the bed-table, is simply beyond his or her definition – leaving the resident stranded for hours without spectacles, drink, mobile phone or a TV-channel control.

Reflective and reflexive

In social work, there is a need to distinguish between two similar but yet different modes of action – between the acts of “reflection” and “reflexive” responses. In the first, it is about contemplation, thinking about what has been done or what has happened, the latter it is about being responsive to the living situations of the users. Where there is action, there needs to be reflection. Not only do people involved in action have to think about what has happened, about what has been done, but also what has to be redone, amended, repaired. However, this needs not to be an interpretation of deeds and action, but seeing them as a whole, with the context and their inter-relatedness.

There is a need to be reflective (in a mirroring contemplation) but also reflexive (in responsive action). Action points back to immanence of interaction and is not reflected in some kind of transcendental mirror. Social work operates in the everyday, ordinary, and banal. Most of human interaction is not ruled by rule of Law, God or hygienic regulations. It is ruled by the flexible, self-constituting little rules and ways of observing, talking, touching and inviting each other, by the rules that are both cultural and made on the spot regarding the intentions, purposes and inclinations of the people involved.

These rules and their immanent meanings are bound to the context, where events happen. Since we do not have good maps for these ever-moving territories, we almost always have to explore them, involving the people participating in them. By using transcendental shortcuts and axiomatic shorthand we will always risk imprecision and missing the point.

Stories as mapping

In social work, many stories are being told. Although any life-course can be narrated as “sad tale” (Goffman, 1961: 67, 151–162) or a “success story”, depending on how the storyteller links the singular events of his or her life into a narrative whole, in social work practice sad tales tend to dominate. Social work users tend to tell sad tales, not so much because of the massive sad experience as for the reason of legitimatising the intervention on the part of the practitioners and the claim from the users.

However personal such tales can be they rely on the standard narrative patterns present in popular culture. Some the stories, have  been told more than a hundred years ago, with a fixed narrative patterns and literary structure. Such is the “story of a junky”, which was told long ago by Thomas de Quincey (1821) and reiterated by Dostoyevsky’s Gambler, told by the Children of the Zoo Station, to be told again in the office of a social worker anywhere on this earth. It is not about the lack of imagination and plagiarism, if it was only a matter of organising the narration, the way of telling the story.

However, it is also a way of organising actual experience, a script to be followed in the actual life, and it could be claimed that people get caught in their biographies (Grebenc 2001). Social work has therefore three tasks: let people tell us their own stories, encourage and help them reappropriate them, transform the sad tales into stories of success and invent means of escaping the biographies, transforming them, giving them different endings, sequels. Actual lives are not like novels with plots, heroes (usually tragic), resolutions etc. Human lives are more like intertwining series of novellas, in which we often overlook the final twists and miss a connection to something that there has not been before. And we fail to see that human lives are more comic than tragic.

Transversality

Social work ties knots of many strands. It knows the language and the matter of many other disciplines, applies it in its own fashion, transverses many diverse planes of functioning, connects them in singular social doings and addresses many different planes of human existence. Therefore, it is unable to reduce the variety of meanings and functions to a single dimension, to the homogenous space of a reductionist profession.

When an old person is placed in an old people’s home, we know that we cannot attribute this placement to only one criterion, e.g. their bodily feebleness, or their personal inability to care for themselves. There may be many different stories involved: it is also about the job their nephew has, the cat that will be left behind, their relationship with neighbours, etc. Still it is also the issue of availability of services, and how they function. Is there a home help available, are there practitioners who will listen to his wants and needs, is there a service that would bring formal and informal support in unison action, what are the rules of how the funds are spent (i.e. can the money available for institutional care be spent to support the person at home), etc.? All these forces and events interact and produce vectors and tensors that will slide an old person into care or let them stay at home.

Transversal action is seeking meaning, which is to be sought on yet another plane, connecting to otherness and amplifying resonance.

Social work understands and employs the events, circumstances and materials, connecting them to other planes. There, a different meaning, use, and function can be found, other than the one in the clean, homogenous zone of existence (like illness/health, right/wrong, clever/stupid etc.). 

Shabby clothing and neglected, “mental patient” appearance, will be seen within the framework of mental health as a sign of the illness, and deterioration; it can be read as a sign of not having many reasons to keep up appearance, or as a loss of interest in self appearance on account of being secluded from the ordinary life, etc. When this person falls in love, he will be dressed well, shaved and trimmed. Was not being in love the reason for his miserable state?

References

Grebenc, V. (2001) Ponesrečeni pobegi ujetnikov biografij. Socialno delo. letn. 40, št. 2-4, str. 151-158.

Goffman, E. (1961), Asylums. New York: Doubleday & Co. (Pelican edition 1968).