ABSTRACT
Sociologists have conducted work on the discourse of occupations such as medicine and education (e.g. Mishler 1984; Jackson 1968; Lortie 1975), and have shown some interest in the talk of social workers (Philp 1979; Dean 1989; Rojek, Peacock and Collins 1988; Pithouse 1987; Pithouse and Atkinson 1988; Whan 1979; Jones 1990). Shaped especially by the frameworks of Wittgenstein and Foucault, this writing is part of a wider auxiliary literature on rhetoric and theorizing in the human sciences, lay theorizing, analyses of the significance of narrative and text in the construction of personal identity, conversations between women and men, and feminist constructions of a sociology for women (Furnham 1988; Pollner 1987; Shotter and Gergen 1989; Simons 1989; Stanley 1990). However, analyses of causal accounts have not been central to this work. Causal attributions and accounts are one facet of the prism of occupational discourse. Our concern in this paper is with the social construction of causal accounts within the occupational community of social work, and with developing an orientation towards producing an ethnography of social workers’ use of causal understandings in making their work accountable to a range of audiences. Our interest is in the possible significance of different kinds of causal accounts resorted to by social workers, the occupational ‘triggers’ for different kinds of causal accounting, and the purposes of such attributions and accounts.
