Control, collegiality and systemic change: an analysis of failures in social work

Failures are recurrent within social services. In some cases, they can lead to opportunities for learning, and in other cases feelings of shame. While most social workers would probably agree that it is desirable to manage these failures positively in the workplace, it is not guaranteed that everyone will share the same ideas on how to achieve this. This article starts from the assumption that social workers' proposed solutions in relation to social service failures are discursively marked, reflecting dominant professional discourses within the field of social work. Hence, to explore such discourses, this article draws on qualitative data from a survey with social workers working within social services in Sweden, analysing interpretative repertoires used by 197 social workers when proposing solutions concerning the management of social service failures and the discursive resources they draw from. The analysis reveals three interpretative repertoires, associated with control, collegiality and systemic change, that draw upon different professional discourses and have different underlying assumptions concerning the character of social service failures. Furthermore, the analysis shows how the identified repertoires relate to prevailing discourses of professionalism within social services, providing insights concerning the discursive conditions within the field of social work in general and social services in particular.