“I'm Gonna Ask You about Yourself, so I Can Put It on Paper:” Analyzing Street-Level Bureaucracy through Form-Related Talk in Social Work

Purpose

 

Researchers have characterized neo-liberal approaches to social and human services as including limited social spending, standards reform, individual responsibility, increased accountability, conservative social welfare policies, and often right-wing politics. This paradigm has been paired with new managerialism (also called “new public management”), which provides a corporate, task-oriented (Harlow, 2003), responsibility-driven organizational paradigm for managing social and human services (Deem, 2001). Morley and Rassool (1999) argue that the “introduction of markets and managers has been a generic transformational device designed to restructure and reorient public service provision” (p. 14). Most scholars acknowledge that new managerialism brings some positive attributes, while still generally illustrating a dramatic shift in social services, moving away from “citizenship rights, and towards services that are increasingly targeted and means tested” (Kirkpatrick, 2006 p. 7). Moore (1998) suggests new managerialism limits social work by depersonalizing service delivery, homogenizing social services. He suggests that social welfare institutions in the United States are beginning to suffer from the same bureaucratic inadequacies as its governing institutions.

Hjörne et al. (2010) argue that social workers “translate institutional policy into daily situated practice on ground level” (45). Lipsky (1980) numbered social workers among the denizens of street-level bureaucrats who put policy into practice in their daily work, suggesting that this new corporate model has shifted the role of the street-level bureaucrat (Lipsky, 2010). He suggested that among other concerns street-level bureaucrats deal with routinization (applying routine behavior and services to clients), which may increase efficiency at the expense of personalized service delivery. What seems to be lacking in the literature on street-level bureaucracy is a more fully developed micro-sociological perspective on the actual delivery of service and policy from an interactional perspective.

This paper, therefore, explores the ways in which caseworkers routinize policy-related practices in their everyday social interactions with clients in an urban, homeless shelter context.

Methods

This interactional institutional ethnography presents a discourse analysis of audio-recorded interactions between 6 caseworkers and 18 homeless clients in an urban shelter.  Data include a total of 54 interactions including caseworker-client dyads, collected over a 9-month period. This discourse analytic approach is informed by applied conversation analysis (Antaki, 2011; Drew & Heritage; Heritage & Robinson, 2011). To triangulate and validate the data analysis, pre, post, and intermediate interviews that assess both client and caseworkers’ perspectives regarding the success of the interactions were analyzed in conjunction with the other data.

Results

Results illustrate that many caseworker-client interactions were built around bureaucratic paperwork, which, from a discourse analytic perspective, prohibited client participation while promoting transparency. Other interactions, which were not built around paperwork, provided greater space for client talk, autonomy, and identity work; however, these were lacking transparency, often resulting in client frustration. Neo-liberal ideologies and new managerialist organizational structures are then, perhaps, double-edged swords, as they function in social work interaction.

 

Implications for Practice

This study contributes to social work literature on interaction, casework, and homelessness. It provides empirically-driven recommendations for caseworker professional development, and it emphasizes the importance of using conversation analysis in social work settings.