ABSTRACT
This chapter explains which comes from a larger fifteen-month ethnographic study that explores the nature of professional identity formation in child welfare. It describes two conflicting epistemological imperatives wired into the caseworker job: one that asks workers to understand clients from a disembodied or so-called objective standpoint and another that asks workers to stand in the client's shoes and understand them from an embodied standpoint. Indeed, workers were literally taught to and expected to gather information about clients from an embodied perspective; but within an institutional and cultural milieu that privileges scientific rationality, they were simultaneously asked to render all information they had about clients in the discourse of objectivity. The chapter identifies four techniques through which workers made child welfare work objective: documentation, collectivization, institutionalization, and audit. It describes these techniques – what motivates them and their consequences – before discussing the implications of conflicting epistemologies and the institutional dominance of scientific objectivity for identity formation in social work.
