Suchergebnisse

This article, based on an ethnomethodological study in a Finnish regional emergency social work service, focuses on emergency social workers' interview accounts regarding case recording. In this context, the IT-based case recording and transferring of information and responsibilities between the actors are emphasized. By means of analysis it is shown how social workers account for and prefer recording information which they call 'factual'. They also account for the distinguishing of facts from other information, without clear explication of what facts actually are. However, there is also negotiation of the norm of 'fact-based' case recording in terms of the things that are not yet certain, but which are important for further understanding and handling of the client's case. The analysis leads to the conclusion that awareness of the constructive and negotiable nature of facts should be taken into account and the apparently obvious nature of 'facts' regarding the production, recording, reading and transferring of a case, particularly in the context of regional emergency social work, should be challenged and studied in yet more detail.

This study investigates how clients' emotions are invoked and reflected in client-worker interactions and themeanings they have regarding leaving home. We concentrate on floating support work, which aims to support people suffering from mental health and substance abuse‐related issues to improve their living in the community. Our theoretical framework is based on the geography of emotions, and we draw on both the interactional and relational approaches thereto. The research material is gathered from Finland and England. We draw on mobile ethnographic and discursive approaches, and our data consists of transcriptions and field notes gathered during floating support visits (N = 19) that took place either at or outside of a client's home. Our findings demonstrate how the connections between places and emotions, the emotions connected to leaving one's home, the emotions reflected while being out in the community, and the reflections of emotions after being out in the community are constructed and reflected in client-worker interactions. The study highlights that these emotions are a necessary and demanding part of promoting clients' social inclusion in the context of floating support work.

This paper studies the creation of organisations via people processing (Prottas 1979), taking as its case study a new and developing family centre that aims to offer various social and health services under the same roof. The study draws on ethnomethodology, meaning that organisations are herein understood as being created and continuously produced in and through interaction. The data consist of 11 audio-recorded meetings from the centre's steering group, which includes managers from different service fields and welfare agencies. In analysing the creation of the centre through people processing, this paper scrutinises how the meeting participants orient themselves toward and produce the centre's client categories, what characteristics they connect to these categories, and how they do boundary work regarding which categories belong or not to the centre's target groups. The meeting participants produce three different family based client categories. The first category is ordinary families, those without any special problems who just pop into the centre to see other people. These families are distinguished from the second category, best matching families, who are defined as having problems that would benefit from the integrated, multi-professional work conducted at the centre. The third category, families with too specific needs, refers to client groups whose service needs are at least partly beyond the centre's expertise and resources. The centre needs these people-processing activities to make sense of its mission, clients and co-partners; this ongoing reasoning process allows the emerging centre to exist and find its place in the local service system.

AbstractThis study focuses on how clients using illicit drugs are supported in managing the boundaries of their homes to avoid the risks that social relationships may have on their daily lives at home. The data consist of 14 client–worker encounters audio‐recorded in 2017 in a Finnish home‐based service for people using drugs. Discursive interaction analysis and geographies of home were applied to examine how boundaries of homes are negotiated in relation to social relationships and how the home is constructed as a risk environment in the interactions of the service. The results highlight that the tensions between home and social relationships can be complex in the context of illicit drug use. Managing the boundaries of the home and social relationships deserves special attention among welfare services to promote their client's right to privacy and attachment to a home environment. This is also important for preventing the risk of homelessness.

In this book [titled Home, welfare work and vulnerability] the authors take the reader on welfare workers' home visits to clients in need of support in their living. Welfare workers refer to professionals in health and social care who in the book are represented among others by social workers, social care workers and nurses. The main concepts of the book are home, welfare work and vulnerability and these are contemplated from different angles. Welfare work entails encountering people who are in vulnerable situations in the midst of their everyday lives. They may need support in coping with their mental health, with physical illnesses, with the challenges of achieving sobriety and recovery or perhaps with the difficulties accompanying old age. On the one hand their ability to act is limited and weak but on the other they have many kinds of strengths and resources.

The book addresses a significant turning point in welfare services and work at which the objective is defined as the right of every individual to their own home and making living at home feasible for as long as possible. In the last fifty years or so many societal factors have made possible the dismantling of institutions, the reduction of places and the shortening of stays in institutions, the further development of care in the community, the construction of small residential and care facilities and most recently the further development of services to be taken into people's homes. The last stage of this dismantling of institutions is referred to in the book as the "home turn". As a societal change the home turn is complex – and that is how it is approached in the book. When one's own home is the main place in which welfare policy and work are implemented, it is important to scrutinize more closely what actually occurs there and what special issues are connected to this given context.

The book offers a timely point of view on the development of welfare services and the grass-root level welfare work done in the homes. It draws on interaction research based on ethnomethodology and human geography. Research data consist of recordings of home visits, researcher's field diaries and interviews with clients and workers. The work includes both chapters providing conceptual and theoretical overviews and empirical research on the encounters between client and worker(s) on home visits. Welfare work accomplished in people's homes entails many tensions and ethical issues which are analysed in the book and made visible through the means of research.