Following and losing the phenomenon: an ethnographic study of self-directed support in children’s social work

This doctoral thesis explores how personalisation gets done in one children’s social work team. It is concerned with the everyday work of social work. Arising from an interest in the stories told about personalisation, its slipperiness and its stickiness, the study explores how amorphous and multiple claims for user choice and control play out on the professional frontline. It does this through the prism of an agent-focused institutional ethnography of social work practice. The study is inspired by a concern with naturally-occurring talk, interaction and discourse, exploring the sense-making and disciplining activities of social workers as they are tasked with making personalisation real. I explore how performances of personalisation are made visible and justifiable within the context of social work with children and families. Through the immersive nature of the case the study encounters paradigmatic themes of contemporary social work with children and families - needs talk, the realities of market-based choice and the moral warrant of child-centred talk. These paradigmatic features impede upon and emerge within the local production of personalisation, uncovering incongruities as workers are caught between burgeoning facilitative cultures for practice and the entrapment of instrumental forms of system rationality at a time of risk anxiety

Authenticity and the interview : a positive response to a radical critique

We respond to recent discussions of the interview, and the ‘radical critique’ of interviewing, as reiterated in publications by Silverman and Hammersley. Reviewing and extending the critical commentary on the social life of the interview and its implications for qualitative research, we endorse criticism of the Romantic view of the informant as a speaking subject, arguing that the interview does not give access to the interiority or private emotions of social actors. We focus especially on the search for the ‘authentic’ voice of experience and feeling, arguing that the expression of authenticity is performative, and that such interviews need to be analysed for their performative features. The biographical work of the interview demands close, formal analysis, and not mere celebration. The argument is illustrated with a single case-study, derived from an ethnographic study of a social-work service in the UK. We suggest that it is possible to derive constructive responses to the radical critique, by adopting an analytic stance towards respondents’ biographical work, as expressed through extended, qualitative interviewing. The speaker’s use of positioning rhetoric is discussed

Surrender, catch and the imp of fieldwork

We build on the work of Kurt Wolff to capture some distinctive aspects of ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on the sociology of knowledge and phenomenology, Wolff introduced and developed the idea of surrender-and- catch in order to encapsulate the twin processes of engagement and reflection. We extend the idea to incorporate what we call the 'imps’ of ethnographic fieldwork. For neither surrender nor catch are themselves predictable or perfectly under the ethnographer’s control. While fieldwork is itself unpredictable, there may be many unanticipated ‘catches’. Moreover, there is often an ethnographic ‘imp’ that intrudes itself, questioning the very desirability or good sense of the fieldwork itself. The imps arise unbidden but can pose searching, sometimes unwelcome – though ultimately productive – questions. We illustrate the paper from a brief fieldwork encounter with the world of studio photography

Reflexive ethnography

Reflexivity refers to the fact that the perspectives and methods of the social sciences construct the phenomena that are studied. Reflexivity is not a matter of choice nor is it a researcher virtue. Ethnographic research needs to take account of the various kinds and levels of epistemic reflexivity: disciplinary; methodological; positional; textual; and personal. We distinguish reflexivity—a condition of all research—from reflective practice, and from the individualistic claims for research virtue that are sometimes made in the name of reflexivity