ABSTRACT
Introduction In this book our focus is on the practices of welfare margins from the point of view of responsibilities and especially responsibilisation. Concentration on practices connects our approach to the so-called practice turn in social and human sciences (Schatzki et al. 2001). This means that we understand practices as “arrays of human activity” that are “organized around shared practical understanding” (Schatzki 2001: 2). It also means that we abandon dualistic ways of thinking (e.g. macro-micro) and do not privilege one human domain, such as individual experiences or structures, over the others (Schatzki 2001: 1-4). Llewellyn and Hindmarsh (2010: 11) notice the theoretical and methodological pluralism in the practice literature. Their own work combines ethnomethodology and organisation studies, because “practice-based studies seem to share with ethnomethodology an interest in the fine details and normative character of ordinary work” (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh 2010: 11). Likewise, we apply ethnomethodological ideas in our analyses of the grass-roots level practices at the margins of welfare services. The origins of ethnomethodology, including the term itself, are in Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) innovative work. Ethnomethodology (EM) studies human actions and reasoning in ordinary everyday practices (Heritage 1984; Francis and Hester 2004). However, by concentrating on everyday human practices, EM cannot be rendered as micro-science as opposed to structurally oriented macro approaches. EM studies can focus attention on how “macro” social phenomena are brought to life in particular encounters (Coulter 2001: 33-34). In regard to the advanced liberal way of governing and current welfare discourses (see Chapters 2 and 3), this means examining whether and how these phenomena are present and talked into being in grass-roots level welfare practices: for example, in clients’ and worker’s talk about their own and others’ roles and identities in services, or in interactions between clients and workers. The main interest is in people’s own orientations and perceptions, rather than explaining their talk and actions, for instance, with abstract social structures or psychological models. Studying grass-roots level everyday practices means concentrating on talk, text and interaction in situ. Talk and text are approached as actions that construct
social realities, not as reports on “something out there”. Interactional emphasis means that social realities are understood as human interaction accomplishments, which are produced and justified in relation to contextual settings that people recognise and to which they position themselves. Based on these premises, we take the data (e.g. interview talk and various institutional encounters) as the starting point in analysing the practices of responsibilisation. It is in these settings that responsibilisation is made true, supported, bypassed, resisted and challenged. This is what we call the “management of responsibilities at the margins of welfare services”. Under the ethnomethodology frame it is possible to draw on different research methods such as conversation analysis (CA), membership categorisation analysis (MCA) and various discourse analytic applications (DA). In this book, these methods are combined in the sense that we apply certain analytic concepts developed and used within CA, MCA and DA that are informed by ethnomethodological premises. The chosen concepts are those that facilitate detailed analyses on how responsibilities are managed at the margins of welfare practices. The concepts are: responsibilities and accountability, categorisation, boundary work, sequentiality, advice-giving, narrative and resistance. We draw especially on studies which make use of analytic concepts that examine institutional human service practices. Such studies have increased considerably during the last three decades, although there are not yet many studies that combine analytic concepts to examine policy-level discourses. In the following, we introduce the ethnomethodologically informed practice approach that is applied in the subsequent empirical chapters that concentrate on analysing the management of responsibilities from various angles. First, we discuss how policies based on an advanced liberal way of governing and welfare discourses (see Chapters 2 and 3) can be examined as human accomplishments in welfare service practices. Second, we describe how the above mentioned analytic concepts can be used in examining the management of responsibilities and the (possible) presence and usages of advanced liberal policies and welfare discourses at the margins of welfare services. The chapter ends up presenting the institutional settings and data of the empirical chapters (Chapters 5-10).
