ABSTRACT
A core tenet of social work is that clients should be helped to work on themselves so they can improve their lives and their abilities to a point where they are no longer reliant on social services for support. To make this possible, social workers have different models at their disposal. While the clients are ostensibly governed by these techniques, models of social work also shape the subjectivities of the social workers applying them. In this chapter, our focus is on the effect of these models on social workers. Our ethnographic approach allows for a more nuanced exploration of how a technology of governmentality is received by those subjected to it, in this case, the social workers. The study highlights that the effects of the same model on practices and perceptions in the same social context differ between individuals, and allows a nuanced understanding of the effects of governmentality in practice.
