ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between texts and day-to-day social work practice. It focuses on social workers' largely instrumental approach to texts, as produced and guided by professional practice. The chapter also focuses on textual production as a form of practice for bridging local and extra-local, particular and universal, hence as expressing a dialectic. It examines the ways that social workers, who agreed to interview youths on their caseloads for the research project that informed this book, actually took up and applied an Interview Guide. In the main social work theorists, when addressing documents and texts, have focused primarily on the instrumental dimensions of record keeping, that is the 'how to', selection and tone of writing, the institutional organisation of records, and issues of confidential storage. Through such processes of taking up a client's words and categories the social worker transforms the client's reality into the discursively organised relevancies of a textually mediated space.
