ABSTRACT
This article explores how multiple contexts – professional knowledge (e.g. case management), institutional practices (e.g. New Public Management), and mental health policies and legislations (e.g. Mental Health Act) – under neoliberal governance (re)produce ways social workers interact with their clients in moment-to-moment interactions. It is part of a larger process and outcome research project on cross-cultural social work practice in outpatient community mental health settings in an urban Canadian city. Using transcripts of audio-taped sessions between social workers and clients with severe mental illness, and inspired by critical theories of language, knowledge and power, we illustrate how neoliberal themes (re)position clients and social workers in negotiating session tasks in everyday interactions, and how these interactions shape the clients and social workers as desirable and undesirable neoliberal subjects. These detailed studies in micro-interactions can be used as practice examples in considering how social workers can be critically reflective of our own micro practice and resist the governing neoliberal ideology in the macro level.
