Tales from the sequestered room: Client experiences of social work in Norway and Sweden

Methods

In Sweden, snowball sampling was used to contact the social welfare recipients. This method was adopted after more traditional ways of contacting interviewees had proved fruitless. Finally, after being introduced by one social worker to a former client, who agreed to be interviewed and then in turn contacted another client, the process gained momentum. Each of the seven women and four men contacted in this way was interviewed at home. The access this method provides to hidden and often stigmatized populations may outweigh the selection bias of samples obtained in this manner (Avico, Kaplan, Korczak, & Van Meter, 1998; Cohen & Sas, 1994; Griffiths, Gossop, Powis, & Strang, 1993; Shaw, Bloor, Cormack, & Williamson, 1996). This technique was repeated in Norway to contact interviewees among social welfare clients and social workers. There, 14 women social workers were interviewed at five social assistance offices employing them, while all but three of the clients (10 women, three men) were interviewed in their homes. These three were interviewed at a university office. As in Sweden, no one refused to be interviewed though one client often scheduled to be interviewed at the university never appeared. All interviewees gave their informed consent to participate in the research and tape-recorded interviews with them were transcribed to preserve their anonymity.

Using a method based on grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), earlier developed in Norway aimed at discovering recurrent themes and patterns in client–social worker relationships (Seltzer, Kullberg, Olesen, & Rostila, 2001), the transcripts were analysed in Norway by the author and a cultural anthropologist living abroad. This kind of comparative inductive analysis yielded several thematic patterns common to the accounts made by the interviewees. Prior to presenting these, it may be fruitful to position this study in relation to the development of social work research – in Scandinavia and elsewhere.

Meetings in the sequestered room

Encounters between social workers and their clients long have been central in social work education. Traditionally, the training provided students of social work focuses on helping them to acquire skills for face-to-face meetings with help-seekers. In Scandinavia, these encounters are understood as sites where many social policies are implemented (Börjesson & Mether, 1989; Morèn, 1992). The primary activity at these meetings is talk: help-seekers talk in order to present themselves and their problems while those assigned to assist them talk in responding to these presentations. Given the centrality of encounters in social work, it is troubling to note how seldom accounts by clients about these meetings have appeared in research literature. Throughout a long period of social work’s history in Scandinavia and elsewhere, the voice dominating descriptions of these meetings in the basic texts introducing students to the profession has been that of the social worker (see Bratt, 1965; Pincus & Minahan, 1973; Shulman, 1982). This mirrors the early history of related professional work in Europe and North America when accounts of what took place in the therapy room were authored as a rule by therapists themselves. Their voices, rather than those of persons in therapy, were the ones describing therapeutic work for generations of students. This began to change in the late 1960s as pioneers in family therapy opened heretofore closed therapy rooms to allow students and colleagues to observe first with the help of mirrored windows and later with audio and videotapes what took place in these encounters (see Alger & Hogan, 1967; Haley, 1976). In opening up therapy in this way and allowing all voices to be heard, it then became possible for students and therapists to gain fuller understandings of therapeutic work (see Seltzer & Seltzer, 2004).

Beginning in the 1970s, a similar development began in social work with the publication of The client speaks: Working class impressions of casework (Mayer & Timms, 1970). Since then, a growing number of studies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have explored in detail the experiences voiced by users of various welfare state services (see Aubrey & Dahl, 2006; Beresford, Adshead, & Croft, 2006; Beresford & Croft, 2001; Cree & Davis, 2006; Fairborn, 2008; Martin, 1998; Morgan, 2006; Ribner & Knei-Paz, 2002; Smith, 2004; Spratt & Callan, 2004). In the late 1970s, Scandinavian researchers also began to attend to clients voices. This development owed much to movements for empowering traditionally marginalized groups. Research attuned to client voices, it was claimed, would help make social service delivery systems more sensitive to their needs (Guttormsen & Hoigård, 1978; Kullberg & Cedersund, 2001; Seltzer et al., 2001).

This research, however, required answers to questions about who clients were as well as how their vulnerabilities expressed themselves. Consequently, investigators began to focus on what women and men told of their experiences as clients. Using interview and observational data, it was shown that while some clients found their meetings with social workers to be helpful, others used words like pain, shame and degradation in reporting their experiences (Kjørstad, 2008; Oltedal, 2004; Ranger, 1986, 1993; Solheim, 1995; Sørensen, 1995; Sunesson, 1985).

In Sweden, discursive researchers provided evidence about the dominance of pejorative discourses about who clients were – and the reasons for their client status (Hydèn, 1991, 1996, 1999; Sahlìn, 2001). As one investigator observed, discourses of this kind about clients were greatly stimulated by political debates in Scandinavia about social assistance and their recipients (Bergmark, 1997). Research also indicated that one effective technique allowing these negative definitions to stand unchallenged was to deny clients a voice in defining themselves in arenas of public debate and the research literature (Bergmark, 1998).

Using client accounts to explore the sequestered room

As Riessman (1993) has emphasized, a most effective way of challenging dominant discourses about social work clients is to allow them to talk about their experiences. From their accounts, researchers then can gain knowledge about how clients see themselves, their identities and their relationships with others – including social workers. Though Riessman’s model for narrative analysis was not specifically employed in this study, its main focus was with the accounts told by clients (and later by social workers) of their encounters.

In the research study in Sweden, a definite pattern emerged when clients were asked about their lives as long-term recipients of social assistance. When talking about their experiences, clients tended to describe social workers in warm and appreciative terms or told instead of feeling humiliated and degraded by them. Consequently, in the study in Norway, clients were asked first to recall and to reflect upon their experiences of being service users at social welfare agencies. If this was described in positive terms, the client then would be asked to reflect on the meeting. After concluding this account, she/he would then be asked to describe an encounter which was ‘not so good’. If the client began with a negative experience, the procedure was reversed. In interviewing the social workers, the same procedure was employed.

This method of research, pioneered in Norway by Levin (2001), aimed to avoid one-sided accounts about meetings between clients and social workers. This method, it was believed, would help structure the interview situation in such a way as to influence the interviewee to provide balance and breadth to her/his account. Additionally, it was felt that this two-sided method could function as an alternative to open-ended questions having the potential for influencing the interviewee to tailor her/his responses to fit what the interviewer wanted to hear. It must be noted, however, that this method introduced a bias into the data by asking interviewees to recall and reflect about two opposing experiences. Another possible bias or influence on the data involved how the author-interviewer was perceived by social workers and clients. For the former, she may have been seen as a professional though out-of-practice colleague sharing with them an identity and professional values, attitudes, language and knowledge. By the same token, she may have been perceived by client interviewees as a social worker rather than a researcher.

The excerpts presented below have been selected because they have been judged by both the author and the anthropologist to be representative for several key themes in the accounts. Paralleling the findings of earlier studies of client accounts in Norway and Sweden (Guttormsen & Høigård, 1978; Ranger, 1986, 1993; Sunesson, 1985), some meetings were described as being supportive, empowering and extremely helpful in combating feelings of shame and stigmatization. On the other hand, some meetings were recalled by clients as extremely frustrating as well as involving feelings of being unfairly categorized and belittled. One common theme specifically raised by 15 of 24 clients was the feeling of having needs ignored, not fully addressed or redefined by social workers. This together with several common themes from encounters defined as ‘poor’ by clients is represented in the following account by one woman about her life as a social welfare client in Sweden.

Gunilla tells of a life denied chances by society – and by social workers

Gunilla was a middle-aged married mother of seven children living in a small rented apartment. She grew up as one of seven siblings and for some time has been receiving a disability pension. Several months prior to being interviewed, Gunilla had been diagnosed with cancer:

I grew up in a family where…Mamma…and pappa were sick…[he] had asthma and momma worked. So we never had any money in the house…So I didn’t know of anything else…and when I moved out, Momma contacted the social work office so that I could get a flat. I was only 16 when I got my first child…and so it just keep rolling after that…I was born in precinct X and was often at the social office there and then I moved to precinct Y and landed at another social office. It is like a vicious circle…I never get on top of things…

Gunilla had long experience with social work agencies. Her stories about herself, her children and encounters with social workers are filled with bitterness, anger and sorrow. In an attempt to gain some balance, when Gunilla was asked to share a ‘good’ story from her encounters with social workers, she replied she had none: ‘I have met so many of them and they all look at me in a degrading way.’

Her tiny budget has seldom provided her with chances to participate in the normal social activities of Swedish society.

I don’t have that background. I never had money to save. There is no chance…All my thoughts are centred on the issues of food, clothes and children…how to manage. I try to tell them, there’s no chance. How am I supposed to be able to pay for everything? And when things break? What do I do?

Gunilla’s diagnosis of cancer has led her to spend time reflecting on her life:

Now I sit here and many times I think: I never got the chance to do anything with my life…I have given birth to seven children and I have fought and battled for them. I was never able to do anything for myself. Like other people do. They have been abroad. I have not even been to Norway, or Denmark or Finland…I would have loved to go to Spain…But you see, I can’t afford that. All I have has to go to the kids…When I go to the social welfare agency all they talk about is norm, norm, and norm. I am so tired of being told about these norms. Sometimes I think that they [the social workers] operate with no common sense at all. I feel all power is in their hands, they decide my life. I am not in a position to make any decisions on my own. Like when they are shocked because I spent money on things they don’t approve of…‘But how could you spend money on that? We can’t let you spend money on that!’ They will throw a fit when that happens and all I can do is to feel ashamed. …. I feel them questioning my purchases and then I start defending myself: ‘that money I had to pay for the boys, the other 100 crowns went to school’ I sit there and try to explain. And she will say ‘but you can’t do that, we can’t have that, we can’t put up with that!’ That’s when I think they have no common sense…Sometimes I have to…remember that my husband actually works and pays taxes and he is never sick…and we’re not alcoholics or anything.

Gunilla focuses much on opportunities she never had. She often uses the expression ‘there is no chance’ in order to explain causation as well as her interactions with social workers. Gunilla’s accounts of growing up, poor living conditions, class background and so on form a habitus serving as the foundation for the story she tells about herself (Bourdieu, 1990). The pre-existing structural dispositions were unstoppable – ‘and so it just kept rolling after that’ – an expression she often uses which can be understood as if her life-course and the forces impacting on it were given and consequently impossible to alter. Gunilla resents her marginalized position in Swedish society and she feels that unlike her social workers, she never got opportunities for self-realization. ‘Others’ out there enjoy the life she feels excluded from. When confronted by mainstream norms and values represented by the social work agency, Gunilla fights against the stigmatized category to which she feels assigned. A main goal for her is promoting a project of dignity for herself and her family: they may be poor but they are deserving. They are not drug addicts and like proper Swedish citizens they pay their taxes and contribute to financing the welfare state. When asked what she would want the social welfare agency to do for her, Gunilla says:

A bit more, it is so difficult to explain, but a little bit more understanding – Like they should say: ‘yes, I understand you Gunilla, this month has been tough. It has been both this and that for you’. Well, someone I can speak to in an open manner…. But now all I do is to wait for the blow to come…Those are the feelings I have. You know what? There are times when I just lie; I don’t dare to talk about things. I just try to invent things in order to keep them from nagging at me. It would have been nice if we really could talk about my expenses…

In telling her story, Gunilla is intent on presenting herself as individual worthy of respect and possessing dignity. In this way, she is much like the former child care clients participating in a storytelling project of ‘direct scribing’ (Martin, 1998). These youngsters, Martin note, ‘found themselves in the telling, experiencing themselves as creating themselves and as recovering themselves from the stories that had been told about them’ (1998, pp. 9–10). Like Gunilla, these former clients long had been the subjects of social workers collecting ‘facts’ and then making decisions about their lives. And like Gunilla, all reported feeling silenced and excluded from being worthy and equal partners in interactions with social workers.

These kinds of experiences are also mirrored in the main finding of Ranger’s study of social welfare agencies in Norway (1986, 1993). In observing communication between social workers and clients, she identified two contrasting patterns of dealing with clients: rule-centred and client-centred. The former parallels in some ways Gunilla’s experiences with social workers. This approach was one where social workers were often required by administrative demands to carry out a quick diagnosis of problems presented by clients and then fit these into the categories of the agency. According to one study of social welfare agencies elsewhere in Scandinavia, social workers are constantly pressured by their superiors to carry out what may be understood as institutionalized identity-work with their clients. Those subject to this kind of administrative processing often reported feeling being assigned a kind of identity (e.g. single mother, addict, asylum seeker, refugee) based largely upon those aspects of their lives fitting predefined agency categories (Järvinen & Mik-Meyer, 2003). As Ranger also found, similar administrative demands left little room for social workers to invite client input in key processes defining and categorizing them and their problems. In rule-centred social work, communication often was dominated by the social worker’s need to collect information dovetailing with agency ideology and definitions. Ranger noted:

The social workers failed to recognize the client’s level of confusion and need for information, response and explanation. They turned a blind eye to clients attempting to tell about their problems and overlooked clients expressing feelings of despair, hopelessness and shame. (1986, p.135)

This way of carrying out social work, Ranger argued, was linked to the need for occupational survival on the part of social workers trapped by conflicting demands from clients, superiors, and colleagues while experiencing work situations lacking both time and money. In coping with these pressures, social workers she claimed developed strategies such as categorizing and simplifying client problems in order to gain control over their own work situations. In addition, categorisations and simplifications of this sort may also be understood as operations necessary for the effective functioning of many street-level bureaucracies including social work agencies (see Juhila, Hall, & Raitakari, 2010; Lipsky, 1980; Prottas, 1979).

Ranger’s understanding of these pressures coincided with findings from an earlier study of burnout among social workers in Norway (Stjernø, 1982). In its detailed examination of work environments at 22 social welfare agencies, this study showed that experiencing superiors constantly overturning one’s decisions about clients was the single most statistically significant factor accounting for burnout among social workers. Moreover, it was found that the greater the client-orientation of a social worker, the faster the burnout process. In relating these findings to the contrasting patterns of social work observed by Ranger, it seems likely that assuming a rule-centred rather than a client-centred approach may have represented a rational choice for social workers wishing to avoid burning out. Perhaps this finding may explain some of the factors influencing the relationship between a social worker and an immigrant woman in the following:

When Sara met social worker Inga

Sara, a young single college graduate from Africa, was a social work client and participant in a government sponsored integration program. When first interviewed, Sara told of feeling shuttled back and forth between low-level language courses and make-work jobs of this program. After having completed three language courses, Sara approached Inga, her social worker, with a desire to study Norwegian at a more advanced level to help qualify her as an officially recognized translator. Sara reported these programs made her a kind of permanent client, rather than a self-sufficient and integrated member of society. When Sara told Inga, that she had managed to be accepted in a program leading to a licence as official translator, she was met with a negative reaction:

She says that this school is just nonsense. She says that if I want to go to that school, they won’t support me…She says I have to take the other language class and that’s through the unemployment office. She says it is much better, because then they [the unemployment office] pay me 244 crowns every day. But if I take the translator course, they [the social welfare agency] have to support me. That they won’t do. They only want to pay the expenses for the room I rent. But I don’t think that class offered by the unemployment office is good for me…I am really angry at the social welfare agency because I really want to learn more Norwegian, but she said: ‘No, you speak Norwegian well enough’. But it isn’t enough…I asked the social worker; ‘Do you think that after 10 months in that class, they will give me a job?’ She answered: ‘No, I cannot guarantee you anything.’ So, why do I have to go then? And the social worker said: ‘You have to go; otherwise you will get no support.’

In telling of this episode, Sara reported feeling stymied by a social worker who denied her access to becoming self-sufficient. Later, several surprising ‘matches’ surfaced as Sara told more about her experiences. It turned out Inga had been one of the social workers earlier interviewed in the study. This kind of match is not surprising given the relatively small size of the population of Norway and the high concentration of immigrants in the district where the interviews were conducted.

Sara’s social worker Inga

The description Sara presented of her life and future hopes contrasted markedly with what Inga earlier had reported about her experiences working with immigrant women. When asked to describe if there were differences between working with immigrants and Norwegian clients, Inga explained:

Oh, yes, the difference is huge. The family structure is among other things, very different. As a feminist and one who always have quarrelled with my father…I see these women as completely tied up when they come here. It is the husband who has the leading role, it is he who decides…we have lots of cases where he sorts out and uses this money as a sort of punishment for things…they don’t get enough food and clothes…The men in those families…are so dominant and so condescending towards their wives and daughters, while the sons probably have a different type of status…This morning one of the other social workers told us about a woman who feels very exposed. She has to play a certain role and pretends to agree with her husband all the time, but she comes to us alone and cries because she does not have enough money to provide for herself and the children…She won’t divorce him. I can advise her to divorce him until I turn green…I guess it is their identity to be married and a part of their husband. And what also happens is that they keep the young girls away from school as soon as they have finished the compulsory 10 years. These girls are very clever and motivated for school and then daddy decides they cannot go anymore. And then after some years, what we see is that they are forced into marriages…Here at the social welfare agency we tend to feel a bit paralyzed…but I think the problems in immigrant families often are totally different from Norwegian families. There are lots of difficulties, lots of family issues……I feel Norwegian families are more equal. She may be beaten, but she won’t take whatever bullshit from her husband. There are differences in attitudes. Immigrant women are more servile…

Inga’s construction of immigrant women is contradicted in many respects by Sara’s account of her experiences. While Sara, who incidentally was twice divorced, was actively struggling to succeed with her life-project, Inga was characterizing immigrant women as passive, servile and tied to their husbands. Inga expressed anger about patriarchs denying young women of immigrant background the right to further education, while Sara told of Inga acting towards her in the same way. Inga’s main project seemed not to be one of empowering immigrant women with education but rather about giving them advice about taking individual responsibility to adjust themselves to the demands of the Norwegian society rather than to resist – especially when such demands are unreasonable and unrealistic such as requiring them to repeat the same make-work and low-level language schemes.

A recent study suggests that Inga’s project for immigrants is shared with other Norwegian social workers (Križ & Skivenes, 2010). After conducting in-depth interviews with 28 experienced child welfare workers in Norway and with 25 of their counterparts in England focused on their views of working with immigrants, the researchers found that the perspectives of these two groups differed significantly along two dimensions. Whilst the majority of the English social workers were highly sensitive and aware of their clients’ encounters with racism and prejudice, the Norwegian social workers were found to ‘embrace a racism-blind, individualistic, change-oriented perspective that views minority parents as responsible service users’ (2010, p. 2634). Also, while Norwegian social workers expected minority parents to become bilingual and bicultural for the sake of their children, the English social workers did not expect bicultural competency from minority parents. Moreover, they viewed immigrant parents and children as families as opposed to Norwegian social workers who viewed immigrants as individuals having special responsibilities to adjust themselves and their children to the demands of the Norwegian society to assimilate.

This dovetails with findings from Rugkåsa (2008, 2010) who carried out anthropological studies of a group of immigrant women in Norway enrolled in a combined work and integration scheme. There she found that Norwegian social workers and others in positions of power in the project were much concerned with teaching these women to take responsibility for dressing appropriately, talking correctly, and otherwise adapting themselves to the norms and values of middle-class Norwegian society.

Sara’s account is reminiscent of experiences with social workers reported by Gunilla. Both tell of meeting women whose lives seem to be so different from their own in terms of opportunities heavily influenced by class position and ethnicity. For example, from Gunilla’s perspective as a poorly educated working-class woman trying to be a good mother, middle-class women social workers balancing child rearing with careers have failed as mothers. She describes them as:

…those…[who] have sacrificed their children! In that way they have been given the chance to study. And they are well off. They have probably chosen their own husband too…they have had a better life…More freedom…Like now, my social worker just left to be gone for 14 days. Mallorca or abroad somewhere . … And I sat there and thought: My Lord, wouldn’t it be nice if I could say the same; I am leaving…How wonderful…But that I can’t do…It so obvious our lives are different. She is older than me…50 something…Slim and pretty and wears make-up and things like that…but she doesn’t have a lot of understanding…She does not understand how I am able to spend that much money. She only has two kids herself and they are adults now…I think she has been able to give her kids all I never could give mine… She has always been able to buy new, not having to twist and bend every penny…she goes to parties and things like that. She does not always tell me things like that, but it happens…

Nils, Hasse and Omar – the good encounters

In contrast to the accounts of Gunilla, Sara and others about experiencing social workers who often seemed to be sorting them into pre-existing categories, a much more positive pattern appeared in the stories told by other clients. This, too, paralleled Ranger’s description of client-centred social workers, less influenced by agency definitions and categorization and more responsive to client definitions of themselves and their problems. Client-centred workers, Ranger noted, tended to see problems of their clients in structural terms, rather than as stemming from personal deficiencies.

This way of interacting with clients is also found in the accounts provided in Sweden by Nils and Hasse. Again as in the case of the matches of the Norwegian material, it was found that these two men shared the same social worker. When Nils was interviewed, he was struggling with long-term drug problems but managing to stay sober for short periods. When asked about his experience with social workers, Nils said: ‘the guy dealing with my money, he is damn nice’. This worker, Nils contrasted to the social worker at the same agency who dealt with drug users whom he described as ‘shit’. When asked to explain the difference between these two, Nils told that the latter was only concerned with forcing him into a rehabilitation program. Nils explained that when he is forced into programs of this sort, his life falls apart: ‘my normal life goes to hell because of that [rehab]. I have to go all over the place and find a hotel for my dog and it becomes impossible to practise on my bike. Things like that…’ When asked if he felt he could deal with his addiction by himself, Nils answered ‘no, not really… but I usually manage in a voluntary way… I just sign myself up for deter… at the hospital… but they won’t let me do that… it has to be done with a constraint…’

The other client, Hasse, was a divorced man with adult children. He had been receiving benefits due to a muscle disease preventing him from continuing as a manual worker. Since Hasse’s benefits did not cover his living expenses, his physician advised him to:

…contact the social welfare agency to get some help…and that’s what I did. I have a damn nice…what’s it called…social worker…he is damn nice…I never met someone like him before. He is fair and kind and knows a lot. I know several guys who have him…but some others are unfortunate and get horrible ones. They follow their rules…But this guy is human. But I guess it is all about luck…who you get…When I have real bad periods and feel unable to move, he comes to my house and we can sit here and chat about this and that. Now that I am in this situation I must say I am happy to have him.

Both Nils and Hasse were struggling with serious life problems, but their accounts testified to the importance of meeting a supportive social worker playing an active role in helping them cope with the difficulties impacting on their lives.

Similarly, Omar, a young political refugee in Norway, told of a series of positive encounters with social workers. Omar had arrived alone in Norway at the age of 16 not long after witnessing the murder of his father. In contrast to Gunilla and Sara, Omar felt that he was seen, heard and supported by the social workers he met since arriving as a traumatized teenager. He emphasized how the social workers were empathetic and attuned to the traumas in his life as well as his feelings of shame about receiving social assistance during the first few years of his stay in Norway:

They sensed I had problems about asking for money so they sent the money to my account every month…I never had to go to them. Sometimes they would call and ask how I was doing. They would even call my school to see how I was doing. I had trouble sleeping and they understood this and so they found me therapy…I am not used to having to ask for things. So they guessed…and then they would come and ask me. Then I could say what I needed, otherwise I felt so much shame.

Omar described social workers as supportive guides helping him navigate and cope with his situation as a refugee in a strange land. He described their relationships as cooperative and reciprocal and added that he felt they were especially sensitive to his need for self-respect. These characteristics also were found in accounts of positive experiences with social workers made by other clients. Their accounts, like Omar’s, were strongly reminiscent of accounts made by ex-inmates of total institutions about help they received from ‘benefactors’ and ‘citizen advocates’ (Atkinson, 1999; Edgerton, 1993; Henderson & Pochin, 2001). In providing this kind of assistance, these actors appeared to be motivated by a shared concern to help vulnerable persons by acting – if need be – as their guides and supporters.

Anne tells about her way of doing social work

Another match in the interviews was represented by Anne, a social worker Sara encountered after she had been Inga’s client. Anne was described by Sara as a professional who had actively assisted her in many ways – especially in fighting for her rights and resisting the institutional identity assigned her. This may have stemmed from Anne’s understanding of working with clients. As she explained,

The most important thing in my work is to be able to see the individual as well as the whole story that is the context. And to be able to do so I depend on having communication skills…I depend on daring to ask the right questions without risking that people fall apart…I am engaged in not violating them and I am engaged in communication. And maybe that’s so because I work with different languages. I constantly have to invent words that mean the same to her as it does to me. Otherwise it’s no good in talking to one another at all…I think that if I am to understand a person and to understand her context, we have to talk a lot together for me to be able to understand her context…Then I can see the consequences of the choices she might take. A part of my job is…not choosing for her…but to discuss the different choices she will make…that is the consequences of the choices. Of course, it is she who has the control – who is in charge of assessing – how to move on. Assisting in that process of assessment concerning choices is a big and important part of my job…We can then toss the ball to one another all the way. I become a co-worker. We work in a relationship with communication and within that communication you find so many values, where my values also take place. And the only way to discuss values is if we meet because our values differ…or are identical…

Anne’s account also touches upon awareness of power differentials in communication. Her views about negative effects of bad communication coincide with the findings of Kløverød (2003) in her ethnographic study of an organization fighting for client rights. Its members repeatedly told her of what they called ‘quiet incidents’ in their meetings with social workers. These were incidents without sound and took forms as a raised eyebrow, a glance, a gaze or a certain posture by the social worker. Kløverød’s informants experienced these as powerful, humiliating and often devastating soundless events. For them, the quality of the help they received was most often related not to the assistance itself, but rather the way assistance was provided. Non-verbal processes of this sort creating as well as reinforcing shame among clients also have been identified by researchers studying other Scandinavian welfare systems (Starrin & Jönsson, 2000). They found that there were particular styles of communicating functioning as subtle and powerful ways of oppressing clients. These researchers have also shown, as both Gunilla and Sara recalled, that social workers may define reality for their clients not only by categorising them but also by deciding what to include as well as exclude in their conversations.

The sequestered room – an arena for understanding social work

As noted earlier, social work often takes place in isolation where asymmetrical power may reign relatively unchecked. Several studies have shown that social workers in these situations possess power for controlling different resources as well as power to accept or reject client definitions of their own needs and wishes (Juhila et al., 2010; Lipsky, 1980; Lundström & Sunesson, 2000; Prottas, 1979). Clients, however, are not the only actors in the sequestered room subject to the influence of asymmetrical power arrangements. Social workers, too, are subject to demands from administrative hierarchies, immediate superiors and their own colleagues. In recent decades, Scandinavian social workers have been disciplined by political regimes, budgetary cutbacks, market demands and media stereotyping (Blom, 1998; Levin, 2001; Mathiesen, 1978; Stjernø, 1982). One illustration of the forces impacting on these social workers is represented by orders from their superiors to fit clients into pre-existing problem and identity categories. This ‘analogical thinking’ (Järvinen & Mik-Meyer, 2003) parallels what de Montigny found at Canadian social welfare agencies where social workers were under constant pressure to provide descriptions combining ‘… details from clients’ lives with organizational and professional categories, theories and themes’ (1995, p. 25).

Earlier the social work members of the profession often spoke of poverty and marginalization in the lives of clients. Today, however, there is a growing focus on motivation and responsibility of clients. This new professional paradigm demands that the client herself must accept the idea that change on a personal level eventually will lead to improving her life situation. One central component for accomplishing change projects of this sort are institutional identities, such as immigrant woman, political refugee, and so on (Järvinen & Mik-Meyer, 2003; Rugkåsa, 2010). This new paradigm is much dependent upon what some researchers term the ‘tyranny of professional discourses’ (Gillman, Swain, & Heyman, 1997) requiring social workers to make use of case documents often benefiting their superiors rather than their clients. Rarely do these documents include the voices of clients and these written accounts often work to silence and to marginalise clients even more.

But a number of voices in the past decade have urged social workers to challenge this paradigm by calling attention to its knowledge/power dimensions as well as the categorizations, assessments and interventions it demands from practitioners (Margolin, 1997; Seltzer et al., 2001). As reported directly in Anne’s description of her way of doing social work and indirectly in accounts presented by Omar, Nils and Hasse about their positive experiences with social workers, there clearly exists today considerable resistance to this paradigm within the profession in Scandinavia. As this and other studies elsewhere have shown (Beresford et al., 2006; Doel & Best, 2008; Ribner & Knei-Paz, 2002), social work is extremely beneficial when it provides space and opportunities for clients to bring forth aspects of their lives and life stories often not properly acknowledged in other arenas. Conversely, social work is perhaps least helpful when clients attempting to express their own needs and to re-author their identities feel that their concerns – often involving class, gender and ethnicity – are being ignored, suppressed or belittled. Given the histories of the Scandinavian welfare states, it is not surprising that these kinds of oppositions are found in the face to face encounters constituting the core of social work praxis. These welfare systems began as products of conflicts between forces of progress and forces of reaction and these conflicts still persist. As this study has indicated, one fruitful way of furthering the positive and progressive promise of social work with its empathy, compassion and solidarity with the oppressed can begin by listening attentively to and recording exactly what the actors in these special sequestered arenas tell of their encounters.

Ethics

In Sweden and Norway, all potential informants were provided with available information relevant to making voluntary decisions whether or not to participate in the research. They were informed that the main goal of the research was to learn more from them about how they experienced social work. All potential informants were guaranteed confidentiality and anonymity. In Sweden, each informant was invited to read, to comment and if need be, to correct, the transcript of her/his interview. In Norway, the collection and processing of the interview data were done in accordance with the ethical standards required by research projects funded by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR).