ABSTRACT
Social workers routinely face a number of situations in which they are required to account for their actions. In supervision sessions with managers, in meetings and at court, their work is subjected to questioning and comment, which might challenge their assessments and inspect their actions. A key feature of the explanations is that they trade on the typicality and difficulty of everyday social work. In contrast to the expectations of policy-makers (with recommendations that younger children need never to be placed in residential care) these cases are recounted with an emphasis on the unique details of the case and these are set against the complexities and unpredictability of the social work task. This chapter attempts to apply theoretical framework of categorisation and accountability to two policy research interviews. It explains how in two contrasting cases categories and their attributes are made available to blame clients and deflect from any criticism of social workers’ own practice.
