Identity Work through Support and Control

Abstract

This article aims to understand how social workers and volunteers, people who see themselves as wanting to ‘do good’, justify the controlling actions they carry out in their everyday practice. They work in organizations that control and regulate the lives of people, while at the same time striving to carry out supportive actions. How, then, do they see themselves, their role and their identity? This is explored through narratives from social workers and volunteers in three organizations in Sweden: victim support, a social services team working with people with drug problems and a probation service. From the narratives of social workers, volunteers and their clients, collected by the author for previous studies, different ways of coping with ‘caring power’, the combination of care and control, are revealed. Both social workers’ and volunteers’ self-identity is understood to be associated primarily with their wish to see themselves as good people, and far less with their actions in the name of their organization. When control is implicit, as in victim support, social workers and volunteers can ignore the controlling aspects of their role. When care and control are obviously combined, as in the social services, they split their understanding so that the individual social worker is regarded as being good, while the organization represents the controlling function. In the probation service, where control is central, social workers and volunteers rewrite their controlling function so that even here they act as good people.

Keywords:

• Social Work
• Social Worker
• Professional Identity
• Caring Power
• Control
• Organizational Role

Notes

1. The helpers in victim support are volunteers and therefore they are not really street-level bureaucrats. Lipsky (1980) argues that street-level bureaucrats are civil servants employed by public administration. However, in my study of victim support I noticed that the volunteers as well as paid employees used a language derived from public administration and that they organized their work as if they were civil servants (Svensson 2002). Therefore, I have chosen to include them in the concept of street-level bureaucrats.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kerstin Svensson

Kerstin Svensson is a senior lecturer in the Department of Social Work at the University of Lund