The improvable self: enacting model citizenship and sociality in research on ‘new recovery’

Abstract

‘New recovery’ has become an increasingly prominent feature of alcohol and other drug policy and treatment responses. Research has been an important site in the emergence of new recovery but its assumptions, politics and productive role in constituting the realities of new recovery have received little critical scrutiny. In this article, we draw on John Law’s typology of ‘simplification practices’ to analyse the reality-making practices operating in two recent and influential developments in research on new recovery: the Assessment of Recovery Capital (ARC) scale and the Social Identity Model of Recovery (SIMOR). Despite their purported novelty, the ARC scale and the SIMOR enact a familiar divide between the individual subject and the social environment. The sociality and material conditions of people who use drugs are constituted as manageable problems that can and should be carefully monitored, controlled and ultimately changed in order to recover. This particular enactment of the ‘social’ underpins and reinforces a hierarchical logic in which individual subjects are obliged to recover by controlling and changing their social environments through enterprise and activity. Despite their good intentions, both the ARC scale and the SIMOR erase the political, economic, legal and cultural relations that shape the lives of people who uses drugs. We consider new recovery’s claims to ‘newness’ and question what kinds of transformations are made possible, as well as foreclosed, by its focus on the improvable self. We conclude by suggesting an alternative focus that prioritises the resources and relations conducive to ‘living well’.

Keywords:

• Recovery
• research
• recovery capital
• social identity change
• John Law
• critical analysis

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 See also Hart and Moore (2014) for an analysis of the treatment of causality in alcohol epidemiology using Law’s typology.

2 An increasing interest in recovery capital is also evident in treatment policy and practice. For example, the ARC scale has been adopted as an optional (but routinely used) module in the assessment protocols used in the Victorian alcohol and other drug treatment sector (Department of Health (Victorian) 2013), and is referenced in Australia’s National Guidelines for Medication-Assisted Treatment of Opioid Dependence as one of three measures for tracking ‘treatment progress’ (Gowing et al. 2014, p. 34). In the UK, the national guidelines on the ‘clinical management of drug use and dependence’ state that it ‘can be helpful during assessment [for psychosocial interventions] to explore the individual’s “recovery capital”’ (Independent Expert Working Group 2017, p. 60).

3 The authors demonstrated moderate to substantial scale test-reliability and acceptable concurrent validity with the World Health Organization’s quality of life assessment instrument (WHOQOL-BREF).

Additional information

Funding

The research on which the article is based was funded by a PhD scholarship from the Centre for Research Excellence into Injecting Drug Use (National Health and Medical Research Council Grant 1001144). During the research phase, Suzanne Fraser was funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT120100215). The National Drug Research Institute is supported by core funding from the Australian Government under the Drug and Alcohol Program and also receives significant funding from Curtin University.