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Power and control sit at the heart of statutory social work. In a profession grounded in social justice, practices of control are often positioned as reinforcing inequality and oppression. Yet normative critiques of control embedded within conflictual theories of power can lead to overlooking the complex realities of everyday practice.
Drawing on practitioner and service user interviews, case file analysis and detailed observations, this book offers a rare ethnographic account of how control is enacted, negotiated and experienced in community mental health settings. Informed by Foucauldian conceptions of power, it moves beyond abstract debate to examine what control looks like on the ground.
Combining original research with critical analysis, it reveals the value of an ethically informed but non-prescriptive approach to the ambiguities of control, allowing for a more modest, honest and heterogenous orientation to progressive forms of practice.
Hannah Jobling is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of York, with interests including mental health social work, social work across time and place and community-based approaches to social support.
Mark Hardy is Honorary Fellow in Social Work in the School for Business and Society at the University of York. He writes on social work theory and practice, particularly the nature of risk within mental health and forensic social work.
Introduction: Virtuous authority? Power and control in practice
1. Theorising power and control
2. Control and community mental health practice
3. A virtual asylum? The various meanings of compulsion in the community
4. Experiencing Control - how Service users navigated CTOs
5. Enacting control - the purpose and practices of CTOs
6. Sense of an ending - deciding when to relinquish control
7. Practice paradoxes and (perverse) consequences
8. Reconciling Control
Reference List
Appendix: How the study was conducted