Katarina Jacobsson

Moving from ‘gut feeling’ to ‘pure facts’: Launching the ASI interview as part of in-service training for social workers

Several standardized assessment instruments have been introduced in social work in the last 10 years. One such instrument, the Addiction Severity Index, is used today in the Swedish social services, as well as in the prison and probation services. Swedish state authorities have strongly declared their intention to implement the Addiction Severity Index interview, though critics are sceptical towards both its practical relevance and epistemological grounds. Given this background, the launch of the Addiction Severity Index interview is important as a case of how new instruments (flagged under the banner of evidence-based practice) are introduced into the field of social work. The aim of this article is to analyse how the Addiction Severity Index interview is presented and taught through in-service training for Swedish social workers. From observations of in-service training sessions, two professional styles seem to surface: ‘traditional’ and ‘new’. The trainer tends to use contrasting dichotomies as resources for constructing these professional styles. For example, ‘objectivity’ and ‘scientificity’ are presented as new professional ideals, rather than common sense or ‘gut feeling’, the latter of which is connected to traditional social work. The construction of a new professional style can be seen as an endeavour to achieve professional status in a more classical sense, partly by making the profession and its content more visible, but also by asserting its legitimacy as evidence-based work.

Interviewees with an agenda – Learning from a 'failed' interview

Social constructionists consider interviews as mutually co-constructing meaning. But what if the interlocutors do not seem to agree on what they construct? What if the interviewee has a particularly strong agenda, far from the intended research topic? Are these ‘failed’ interviews? We address this issue using a ‘deviant’ interview in a study of ‘being a neighbour’. First, we add to the discussion of interviewees’ category representativeness by acknowledging a situation when the interviewee insists on representing a category not intended by the researcher. Second, we address the notion of asymmetries of power, where it is often assumed that the interviewer has the upper hand. Through this case, we argue that the opposite may well be true. Finally, we argue that cases where the interviewee pursues a strong agenda may suggest new research areas. After all, strong efforts of resistance may indicate deeper cultural concerns.

A Token of Gratitude? A Morally Ambiguous Case of Bribery

The phenomenon of bribery is characterized by its elastic features, both morally and legally. This study sets out to investigate a court case of bribery: how the people involved construct and argue for their particular version. A single case of bribery is chosen in order to clarify the range and potential of various descriptions of the very same event. The material consists of interviews with the parties involved: a male lawyer who was charged with bribery, a female court clerk for whom the bribe/gift was intended, and the prosecutor who handled this specific case. When telling their stories—representing a non‐criminal and an illegitimate version of the event—they also construct two perspectives as incompatible: ‘the right [legal] way’ and ‘the human way’. With regard to these perspectives it is not only the convicted lawyer who accounts for his actions, but also the clerk and the prosecutor.

Accounts of Honesty: Refuting Allegations of Bribery

This article investigates the stories told by Swedish men charged with bribery. The interviews are drawn from a study of court cases relating to bribery. White-collar criminals often justify their actions with reference to business culture: “Everyones doing it.” In this study, when refuting allegations, interviewees also invoke a “folk logic of bribery,” thus making use of mainstream cultural resources. Received ideas of a “real” bribe include the act itself, but also the moral character of the people involved. Accordingly, interviewees tailor a version in line with these ideas to refute the allegations against them.

‘State governing of knowledge’ – constraining social work research and practice*

ABSTRACT Evidence-based practice (EBP) has been launched, spread, and established in social work in Sweden in the last decade. Today, impact studies and ‘what works’ are the recommended approaches, and medical ways to understand and examine social problems thus are prioritised over the broad social science perspectives on which social work rests. This development has culminated in an institutionalised system called ‘state governing of knowledge’. We analyse the Swedish EBP movement as an ‘epistemic community’, directing our attention to the ways in which evidence is constructed and proclaimed valid for policy and practice. Empirically, we build on documents from various actors involved in EBP in social work and on results from our on-going research on documentary practices in the social services. We identify four strategies that key actors use within the Swedish EBP community to contest, redefine, and constrain the academic knowledge base of social work: efforts to (1) construct a (state) knowledge bureaucracy, (2) standardise social work research, (3) exclude important aspects of social work expertise, and (4) govern social work practice. All four strategies are supported by ‘improvement rhetoric’ that aims at justifying the project.

Struggling for One’s Name: Defense Narratives by those Accused of Small-Time Corruption

ABSTRACT Under scrutiny (what we term a “bribery gaze”), many interpersonal exchanges in work contexts are perceived as bribes rather than gifts, tokens of appreciation, or mundane favors. Current Swedish bribery laws are strong, and the media keep a vigilant eye out for suspicious activities. From a wide set of qualitative data, we selected 13 interviews with formally-accused middle managers and low-level officials in Sweden who claimed to be innocent of small corruption. We discovered that they were more concerned with defending their honor than with job losses, material losses, or legal repercussions. The interviewees used a contrast structure: While they defined the humiliating accusations and disproportionate measures as turning points, they narrated their moral struggles and claimed their innocence by retelling significant events. These personal narratives from those accused of corruption showed that honor remains very important in contemporary society.

Serendipity in Anthropological Research - The Nomadic Turn

Not as isolated events, but as a practice invariably tangled up with other activities, routes and rhythms, which pressure and interrupt getting the washing up done and put away, or the recycling sorted into one of four (or more?) receptacles. Contingencies that might find people bunging dishes in a dishwasher, or filling up a sink full of hot water and leaving the dishes to soak, only to do it again in the morning, or chucking unsorted recycling into a black bag to speed its passage from the house. Kids, partners, pets, interruptions, ruptures and breaks of all kind make up the intensity of domestic social life, and the familiar distractions and hurries are surely the very stuff of everyday life, and place for that matter – complicated, entangled, uncomfortable and messy, yet, ultimately, socially organised. And these kinds of specificities and interruptions and mundane troubles – the very things that Pink is arguing are important – feel lost both within the (re)enactment procedure and, in other chapters, among the theory-driven commentary that peppers the short sections of description and data, drawing the attention ever outward and ‘beyond’ practice and place. Despite these potential limitations, the book will undoubtedly make a contribution to sustainability research and provide an important means for researchers to approach the accessing of local practices and settings of activism. And while the aim, to draw attention to the everyday experiences and entanglements of practice and place, is certainly laudable, the portrayal, dismissal and attempted departure from perspectives and methods, which, agree with them or not, continue to inform the cutting edge of contemporary social science – and have a good deal to offer this particular field – is, perhaps, unsustainable.