ABSTRACT
Structurationists, such as Giddens (1984, 1993) and Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) offer us a mechanism for gaining insights into core professional attitudes such as certainty and uncertainty. For these theorists, attitudes and behaviors are outcomes of a complex dynamic which occurs between individuals and their community. Structurationists help us to recognize that agents (e.g. social workers) and social structures (e.g. the social work profession) interact in a dialectical relationship that yields sets of social prac tices (e.g. supervision2). The duality of agents and social structures leads to social practices that both shape and constrain their users (Giddens, 1984), As novices move through their professional training programs, they learn to deploy profession-specific formats of these social practices. This process, laden with both explicit and tacit values, has a powerful socializing effect on students who must learn to successfully intervene in their profession’s social world while surviving the process of being evaluated (Schryer et al., 2003).
