Stephen A. Webb

Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland

Nikolas Rose examined the rise of psychotherapeutic and social care cultures. Using the work of Foucault he showed how they involved in a kind of micro-power or what he called "governmentality"

A whole range of governors of conduct in our own culture - social workers, nurses, even prison officers - give their authority legitimacy because it has undergone a kind of therapeutic mutation. They exercise a therapeutic authority, and this gives it a new ethical basis, a way of legitimating itself at a time, and in a climate, in which all authority has to justify the authority which it wields

Link between power and the ethics of self as a latter day form of spiritual guidance. “I suggest that the rise of the psychotherapies as techniques of spiritual guidance is intrinsically bound to this injunction that the self must become the subject of choice in its everyday life, in order to realise its potential and become what it truly is. Therapies are sought out by individuals when they feel unable to bear the obligations of choice. Or individuals are directed to therapy where others consider them to be unable to exist as responsible choosing selves” (Rose).

Power in social worker-client relations - Types of Power

Social workers don’t really need a sociologist to come along and point out the power relations in these practices, because in many ways they are obvious - which doesn’t mean to say they are not important.

Social work is a relations of clienthood.

In order to enact this activity called direct work, one person characteristically travels to another persons place of work. One person controls the time, the frequency, the physical location, the layout of the room in which the activity occurs. These features of the situation already establish certain vectors of power. Of course, there are some case when the social worker travels to the client, but apart from home visits this is usually when the client is in confinement in a mental hospital or in a prison.

Money or resources are usually at stake. Social work may seem to be freely given as the help of one person for another who is suffering. But social care is contractualized. There is a lot that could be said, and indeed has been said, about the role that money and resources plays within the social worker client relationship. Some literature argues that the resource or financial relation disguises a relation of inequality and power, if not exploitation.

Social work involves a kind of power that might be termed priestly. One person confesses and is known. The other does not, remains secret, mysterious, merely hears the confession. This kind of relation involves what Pierre Bourdieu terms ‘symbolic violence’. One person has the capacity to reshape the meanings through which the other makes sense of their life and their actions. This is often done through a highly specialised and technical language, or an affective language that invokes notions of feelings, well-being and individual progression.

Social work turns public and social ills in to private woes. This type of criticism was very powerful in the 60s and 70s, where it centred in particular on the depoliticizing effect of social work. It takes problems that are the consequence of the damage wrought by social and political disadvantage, by cultural or ethnic discrimination or oppression, and often construes them as private, individual difficulties amenable to solutions by working upon the damaged individual or family rather than the things doing the damage.

Social work aims to normalize people into neat categories that conform to requirements of a dominant ideology. Increasingly it tries to do this through the use of scientific techniques. Social work experts are therefore dealing directly with fundamental ethical judgements and questions about how people should live. These can involve very physical and material things related to hygiene, cleanliness, or more complex emotional aspects relating to how people ought to relate to each other.

A stronger claim is that social work is significantly involved in forming or constructing certain types of "self" or individuality. Its' languages, techniques and types of authority, have actually played a significant role in making us up as certain kinds of self. The kind of persons that we now take ourselves to be are tied to a kind of project of our own identities: we are to live, and to discover our identity as a matter of our own freedom.

This is a process that is embodied in the practice and policy of social work that entails the reduction of difference to a common gold standard (good enough parenting, healthy attachement and well-being). It effectively means the reduction of difference. It is this de-differentation between the boundaries and specializations of social work, between meaning and outcome, surface and depth, high and low values, which leads to a reconstruction of both social work and the "life-world" of clients.

Language, then, is crucial in this matter of power and influence in social work. But social work is more than just language. It is a technology of care. That is social work regulates people's lives by getting us to find new ways of working on ourselves in a rather practical kind of way. Michel Foucault took confession as it operated within the apparatus of priestly power in the Catholic Church, as a rough model of the type of technology in the therapies (Foucault, 1979). Confession, Foucault argued, was a practice of subjectification.

Here social work is involved in what might be called the psychologizations of the mundane. A whole range of everyday matters have been made in to psychological affairs, that is to say, matters which are discussed and understood in a therapeutic language. It is not just the rise of counselling in general, or even marriage guidance counselling, or sex counselling. There is counselling for debt, for diet, around reproduction, childbirth and a whole array of matters which are to do with the minutia of how one leads a life. These have become rephrased in social work languages and judgements, which have permeated way beyond the consulting room, onto television, radio, into the newspapers and magazines.

Social work regulates the individual self through a variety of techniques. It does not merely equip people with a certain language (rights-claims, feelings talk). It does not merely equip people with a certain way of disclosing and accounting for their inner world or making it bearable in certain ways. Social work also equips clients with certain techniques for acting upon themselves in order to reform themselves. Social work by providing people with certain ways of reflecting upon themselves, enjoining people to reflect upon themselves, to interpret their actions, their conduct and their words in particular ways and to bring them forth in particular situations, is giving people a ‘mental technology’ for acting on their life in thought, and so perhaps in action.

We can identify four technologies of care that social work is engaged with via its interventions

Techniques of engaging with the self: an epistemological mode, for example, which searches for past determinants of present states, an interpretative mode, in which the word or act is understood in terms of its significance in relation to other parties to the interaction, a descriptive mode which seeks to fix attention on conduct dissected into micro-competencies such as grooming, bathing, eating, eye-contact which can be recorded, normalised and made the subject of pedagogies of social skills.

Techniques of disclosing the self: ways of speaking not only in the consulting room, but to children, bosses, employees, friends and lovers. We do not merely have ‘confessional’ styles, but a whole range of other ways of putting the truth of the self into discourse, making it hearable, seeable, inscribable, hence manageable, manipulable. And we have a proliferation of sites within which human beings are required to reflect upon themselves in psychological terms and render this into speech, from the doctor’s surgery to the radio interview.

Techniques of evaluating the self, diagnosing its ills, calibrating its failings and its advances in terms of the norms of the intellect or the personality propagated by psychology, the repertoires of feelings and emotions disseminated by the therapies, the forms or normality certified by the proponents of cognitive and behavioural systems.

Techniques of reforming the self : the purgative effects of speaking out, the liberating effect of understanding, the restructuring effect of interpretation, the little practices for the re-training of thoughts and emotions, the techniques one should adopt to raise self-confidence and to maximise self-esteem. Of particular importance is new methods for the therapeutics of behaviour and cognition, versatile micro-procedures which can be taught by a variety of professionals and utilised by individuals in order to reshape their psychological self to ‘take control of their lives’ within an ethics of ‘empowerment’.

It seems to me that children's services, particularly statutory based, regulate, normalize and control parental-child relations. "Childhood is not a natural condition. That is to say, children, childhood, play and development are discursive phenomena that lack a natural, unmediated nature." Current child care research on child development, children's play, affective relations and attachment is seen in terms of a matrix of cultural practices and pre-occupations. It is shown that children's services functions – in conjunction with the promises of neurologists, paediatricians and developmental psychologists – as a form of ‘ritual magic’ (Nelson-Rowe, 1994)

Children who present "challenging behaviour", "attachment disorders" or "act out" are made into idealized entrepreneurial subjects. Simple behavioural standards (e.g. ‘sits alone’ and ‘plays with simple objects’) are set and disposition factors (e.g. ‘irritability’, ‘highly nervous’ and ‘mental balanced’) evaluated. A premium is placed on educational toys used in family centres, play groups and nurseries, and which parents are encouraged to buy for their children. Rattles and mobiles are things of the past, with electronic toys now starting to dominate retail sales. Geniusbabies.com offers such great online specials as Baby Mozart, Baby Einstein and Baby Bach compact discs as well as ‘Baby Bright Starts Gift Set’. A toddler magazine called Baby Talk ran an article ‘Why you should choose your baby’s toys as carefully as you choose your baby’s food’ (February 13th, 1994).

Despite of research to the contrary, (Bruer, 1997) the implicit message promoted in children's services is that very early experiences alone produce lifetime potential. Simultaneously, the discourse and practices of children's services extend and legitimize the extension of governmentality over lower income populations, which are perceived as threatening social and state security. Accordingly, child care discourse affirms middle-class values/lifestyles by invoking cultural practices and preferences of the ‘ideal’ enriched environment and for ‘stimulating’ development. It also functions, inadvertently, to problematize families by capitalizing on the middle-class’s ‘fear of falling’.

Stephen A. WebbGlasgow Caledonian UniversityScotland