Case history discourse: a rhetoric of troublesome youngsters and faceless treatment

Abstract

In numerous social control settings, staff routinely write case histories on clients to assist colleagues and authorities in treatment decisions. In this article, we examine how such institutional writing constructs ‘working versions’ of youngsters, portraying their objects of care as personally troublesome. Simultaneously, the institution is portrayed as facelessly, uniformly and collectively remedying their behaviour. Using material from a centre for juvenile delinquents in Sweden, we analyse three discursive techniques that accomplish this documentary reality: (1) trouble zooming, (2) mood notes and (3) deflecting staff agency. We also reflect on the social conditions for the recurrent rhetoric.

I oräkneliga miljöer för social kontroll skriver personalen journalanteckningar om klienter för att bistå kollegor och myndigheter i behandlingsbeslut. I den här artikeln undersöker vi hur sådant institutionellt skrivande konstruerar ‘tillfälligt fungerande versioner’ av ungdomar där föremålen för behandling framställs som personligen bekymmersamma. Samtidigt framställs institutionen som ansiktslöst, uniformt och kollektivt beteendereparerande. Med hjälp av material från särskilda ungdomshem i Sverige analyserar vi tre diskursiva tekniker som åstadkommer en sådan dokumentär verklighet: (1) problem-zoomning, (2) humörnoteringar och (3) avledande av personalens aktörskap. Vi reflekterar också över de institutionella villkoren för denna återkommande retorik.

Keywords:

• rhetoric
• juvenile delinquents
• social control
• documentary reality

Nyckelord:

• retorik
• ungdomsbrottslingar
• social kontroll
• dokumentär verklighet

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

David Wästerfors is an Associate Professor at Lund University in Sweden. His recent publications include ‘Disputes and Going Concerns in an Institution for “Troublesome” Boys', in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and ‘Reanalysis of Qualitative Data’ in Qualitative Data Analysis—The Sage Handbook. Apart from his interest in institutional youth care, he has also been engaged in studies of corruption, scandals, disabilities and masculinities, often from an interactionist, ethnomethodological narrative and constructionist viewpoint.

Malin Åkerström is a Professor of Sociology at Lund University in Sweden. Her research focuses on ethnographic studies of social control and deviance. Her most recent book is Suspicious Gifts—Bribery, Morality, and Professional Ethics (Transaction), and she has published articles in Social Problems, Symbolic Interaction and recently ‘Balancing Contradictory Identities—Performing Masculinity in Victim Narratives’ in Sociological Perspective.

Notes

1. It may be more similar to the treatment centre studied by Buckholdt and Gubrium (1979) where the behavioural principles of the token economy were often negotiated.

2. In other studies of social service workers, however, the opposite may be true. Consider, for instance, social workers who report that they never read case reports before meeting their clients, so that they will not be ‘biased’ (de Montigny, 1995, p. 172).

3. See Fairclough (1995, p. 5), for a discussion of telling silence in discourse.

4. It might be noted that this article deals with how records are produced from control agents’ everyday data from institutional everyday life; how they produce records out of their formal interviews with inmates is another research area (cf. Emerson, 1994).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish National Board of Institutional Care.