ABSTRACT

This chapter illustrates some of the routine ordering frameworks in use by social workers, attending to how deviance, risk, certainty and uncertainty are marked in the talk and to the nature and artfulness of causal attributions. It argues that through case narratives social workers, too, learn how to ‘do being’ social workers, how to do the social work in social work. Using transcripts of naturally occurring conversation, interview data, and documentary analyses, the work shows how referrals received from other professionals and the public are coded and categorized, and how social workers artfully accomplish ‘caseness’, by referencing danger, risk and deviance in their talk. There is a general consensus that social work with children and families has become more focused and specialized, not with child welfare generally, but with ‘child protection’ specifically. Social workers do have room for ‘invention within limits’, and their risk-talk should properly be seen as ‘ethnopoetics’ – as skilful oratory, with certain ritualized and routinized features.