Institutional Ethnography for Social Work

Two transcribed segments from interviews with youth in care and their social workers are presented and analyzed to explicate the intersections and ruptures between youths’ experiences and professional and organizational orders. First, a young woman identifies entry into state care and the involvement of institutional workers: e.g., police, ambulance, children’s hospital, Children’s Aid Society, foster home, etc. Her life became a work site that is taken up by various institutional employees. Second, another young woman expresses her frustration and anger with her social worker. She complains, “You never come to see me unless it’s something like this”. Here she articulates her experience of tension and conflict between a desire for genuine caring and committed relations and the realities of distancing and dehumanizing institutionalized and professional practice. These segments reveal just how social workers and clients reflexively accomplish relations and selves as shaped by institutionally relevant categories and objects.