05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 161
Qualitative Social Work Copyright ©2004 Sage Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 3(2): 161–177 www.sagepublications.com DOI:10.1177/1473325004043381
ARTICLE
A Method for Investigating Practitioner Use of Theory in Practice Jerry Floersch Case Western Reserve University, USA
ABSTRACT
KEY WORDS: critical realism knowledge-inaction
This article describes a methodology for studying the relationship between scientific theory (technical-rational or textbook) and theory generated in practice (knowledge-inaction or practical). It identifies the written and oral practice narrative as empirical sites for studying the use of technicalrational theory in practice. The strengths and limitations of studying the written narrative alone are discussed and a method for juxtaposing the oral and written narrative of the same practice event is described. By respecting both forms of knowledge as productive powers, identifying their empirical referents, and investigating in vivo practice events, it is argued that practice research will remain open to discovering its dual or holistic potential.
practice ethnography practice narrative reflective practitioner technical-rational
161
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 162
162 ■ Qualitative Social Work 3(2)
INTRODUCTION Although rarely using the same terminology, scholars of professional practice view theory in practice with two broad concepts, technical-rational knowledge (TR) and knowledge-in-action (KIA). In this article, I propose a methodology for studying the relationship between TR and KIA that is rooted in a set of interrelated critical realist assumptions. Since practice events occur in process – in a specific time and place – and in open system environments (Collier, 1994: 40; Sayer, 2000: 15), the study of practice requires methods that capture in vivo or experienced events. And to avoid methodological holism (Archer, 1995: 3) – reducing the whole of practice to one structural component – researchers need to investigate how practitioners uniquely deploy the liabilities and powers (Collier, 1994: 61–5; Sayer, 2000: 51–5) of TR and KIA. Conceptualized as two separate powers that form one empirical event called practice, TR and KIA have no before-the-fact privileged position in practice; intrinsically, one is not more absolute or powerful than the other. Yet, how do we investigate the relation between TR and KIA? Where do we find the empirical data? What are the implications when investigators, for various methodological reasons, study one practice component and exclude the other? These are the methodological questions that I address in this article. In the first section, I will define the concepts TR and KIA by briefly reviewing a literature on the relation between theory/general in practice/particular. Next, using examples from historical inquiries of social work, I argue that written narratives have methodological strengths and limitations for the study of practice; the historical approach is contrasted with a method that juxtaposes TR and KIA data (Floersch, 2002). In the conclusion, I propose a set of concatenated research procedures for investigating how practitioners use TR and KIA in practice contexts.
TECHNICAL-RATIONAL AND KNOWLEDGE-IN-ACTION Scholars and practitioners conceptualize professional work as having universal and particular characteristics. In short, practitioners use theory to generalize about a problem and practice is what they specifically do about it. To call something ‘textbook theory’ implies that it is removed from the field of practice and refers to the abstract world of professional academics. In part, theory is used to forecast the probable effects of interventions. However, when studying practice in vivo, investigators must account for the actual world, where theory guides but is not an exact reproduction or representation of practice interventions (Berlin and Marsh, 1993: 11–12). Thus, exemplified by the work of Donald Schön, an entire literature has grown to clarify theory in practice. In The Reflective Practitioner, Schön describes a ‘crisis of confidence in professional knowledge’ (Schön, 1983: 3) that is produced by the unrealistic expectations of
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 163
Floersch Investigating Use of Theory in Practice ■ 163
technical-rational knowledge. Rational, for Schön, refers to how ‘science’ produces knowledge and ‘technical’ signifies the necessary skills to fix or transform objects. Jan Fook, although not calling it TR and KIA, has aptly contrasted these forms of knowledge as the difference ‘between “bottom up” (inductively developed) and “top down” (deductively applied) theories. Both are needed in any type of effective practice’ (Fook, 2002: 84). In short, Schön’s knowledge-in-action concept is Fook’s ‘bottom up’ theory, which allows ‘us to constantly apply our thinking in ways relevant to the situation at hand’ (Fook, 2002: 84). I refer primarily to Schön’s work because he conceptually moved the idea of KIA forward in social work by arguing against any privileged use of TR. He does not propose a practice without theory or skills. Instead, Schön argues that theory and technical skills are necessary but not sufficient; practitioners must also rely on knowledge gained from practice. And the reason he views ‘knowledge-in-action’ (Schön, 1983: 54) as productive is because KIA helps practitioners handle the ‘uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflicts’ of actual practice. Although not claiming to be a critical realist, Schön’s KIA characteristics refer to the process and open system assumptions summarized above. For Schön, TR refers to the general and KIA to the particular; each has different powers and liabilities. Acknowledging the significance of knowledge-in-action, scholars from many disciplines have been conceptualizing the role of practice in theory development. For those in education, there is the cognitive and learning literature on situated learning; here, learning is contextual, intersubjective, relational, and specific, not the single or direct extension of intrinsic capacity or teaching theory (Lave, 1988; Lave and Chaiklin, 1993; Rogoff, 1990). In social work, practice wisdom (Klein and Bloom, 1995; Kondrat, 1992; D. Scott, 1990), tacit knowledge (Imre, 1985; Sternberg and Horvath, 1999; Zeira and Rosen, 2000), and personal practice models (Mullen, 1983) are various names referencing the work of KIA. Others, inside and outside social work, have called for the study of the reflective practitioner (Berlin and Marsh, 1993: 224–6; Fook, 2001, 2002), the deliberative practitioner (Forester, 1999), the practitioner–researcher (Hess and Mullen, 1995) and the practitioner of reflexivity (Taylor and White, 2000). I found further support for the terms TR and KIA by examining a literature in social anthropology where the relation between the general (culture) and the particular (local) has been debated. The terms local knowledge (Geertz, 1983), situated lives (Lamphere et al., 1997), and situated knowledge (Rhodes, 1991; Haraway, 1988) are indexed to the forces resisting or complementing cultural homogenization and assimilation. Here, subjects of colonial governments are not mere copies of the colonizer (Apter, 1992), and neither are peasant farmers pawns of landlords ( J. Scott, 1990). Philippe Bourgois, in In Search of Respect, concludes that drug dealers resist through their unique formulations of
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 164
164 ■ Qualitative Social Work 3(2)
street culture. In short, individuals are not so determined by cultural forces that local difference and knowledge is obliterated. Likewise, practitioners are not so inevitably dominated by TR that their individual KIA is rendered predictably subservient. Therefore, anchored by Schön, and reinforced by a large interdisciplinary literature, I assume that TR and KIA are constituent parts of practice power. TR is produced by science and refers to the general and KIA refers to realities that TR cannot capture or represent, that is, practitioners produce local, specific, contextual, or situated knowledge in practice. Yet how do we study both practice powers in context?
THE USE OF HISTORICAL METHODS TO STUDY PRACTICE I review two investigations that exemplify a type of analysis that captures the work of the technical-rational but does not represent knowledge-in-action. Although numerous works could be used to meet my aims,1 I select two – Karen Tice (Tales of Wayward Girls), and Leslie Margolin (Under the Cover of Kindness) – because of a shared methodological characteristic: to analyze data, they each utilize the Foucauldian idea of the ‘disciplinary gaze’. I will compare how these scholars marshal case record and other textual data to confirm a regulatory or controlling theory of social work’s TR function. Particular attention will be paid to how they deductively derive technical-rational practice from written narratives: case records or academic texts. I use these historical investigations to demonstrate the strengths and limitations of studying TR alone. Tales of Wayward Girls
Case records are used by Karen Tice (1998) to make two knowledge claims about the early US history (1895–1930) of social work practice: (1) social workers non-reflexively controlled clients by keeping close watch and writing detailed case records; and, (2) case records functioned to invent and reproduce social work as a profession. Tice skillfully documents and crafts her investigation of case records, effectively uses secondary sources, and produces new interpretations of case recording from the reading of hundreds of primary records. Tice argues, in a chapter ‘I’ll Be Watching You,’ that social work’s most basic function is to watch, to monitor, and to apply a ‘disciplinary gaze’. Thus, at the outset we are predisposed to discover how the casework method (i.e. TR) produces a disciplinary gaze but no theory or methodology is described that would identify the source of a gaze counter to ‘watching’. Tice concludes that case recording accomplished two interrelated tasks for the emergent profession. First, it provided a method to separate unscientific from scientific charity. Early social workers used case records to apply taxonomies: in welfare, for example, the separation of the worthy from the unworthy. Progressive era activists and caseworkers opposed indiscriminate
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 165
Floersch Investigating Use of Theory in Practice ■ 165
charity – not alms but a friend – and they needed data on single cases of poverty, illness, and social maladjustment to justify their approach. She argues that social workers preferred face-to-face, community-based interactions, and by engaging the subject of inquiry in a helping relationship, a ‘close association’ (TR) method produced the need for recording the details of everyday life. Tice draws this conclusion from investigating social work’s academic writing and case recording; in her methodological reasoning, these data are used as examples of the profession’s watching and controlling function. She writes that, writing case records had, by the 1920s, become a primary disciplinary obligation. Professional arguments no longer centered on winning support for encyclopedic case documentation; that point had been won. Instead, debates focused on how best to assemble case stories. (Tice, 1998: 48)
Indeed,Tice convincingly shows that the trial and error methods of early recording efforts eventually became codified as technical-rational (scientific) casework methods, like Mary Richmond’s extensive classification system in Social Diagnosis. Tice argues that in watching, seeing, and making ‘cases’, social workers produced specific ‘looks’, or technical-rational assessment techniques; borrowing from Michel Foucault, she called this look a ‘disciplinary gaze’. Tice uses intensive case study material (‘Hazel’) and hundreds of other primary records to show that social workers were not unified in how they conducted and constructed casework. Through Miss Sarah Champine’s – a caseworker with the Girl’s Department of the Minneapolis Citizen’s Aid Society – narrative production of Hazel we learn about the recording of every detail of Hazel’s life; among other things, she goes with Hazel to shop for school clothes. Here, the social worker uses a seemingly innocuous and everyday event to monitor and regulate Hazel’s manners. Because Hazel’s clinic-based psychiatrist did not have access to shopping information, Tice argues that the psychiatric narrative was theoretical, universal, and totalizing. Hazel, through the psychiatric gaze, was a case of ‘ . . . an introversion, and a paranoid tendency which are unhealthy mentally and inimical to a satisfactory wholesome personality adjustment’ (Tice, 1998: 85). Contrariwise, according to Tice (1998: 86), Miss Champine relied ‘upon common-sense attributions that lacked the conceptual tidiness of psychiatry’. Miss Champine recorded events that reveal her ‘parentlike’ struggle with Hazel’s spending, dressing, and socializing habits: Although Miss Champine controlled the descriptions of Hazel’s emotions and experiences just as she controlled the spending of her wages and her placement in working homes, she does not seem to have been the heavy-handed agent of social control so often portrayed in accounts of social workers. Her struggles with Hazel over appropriate clothing and exchanges of gifts bring to mind not
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 166
166 ■ Qualitative Social Work 3(2)
the absolute power of a disciplining agent of the state acting on passive clients but rather a more complicated, cross-class relationship that featured somewhat maternal struggles with a recalcitrant daughter. (Tice, 1998: 96)
Although the above statement suggests that social workers may have been working outside of technical-rational paradigms, a ‘parentlike’ KIA mode for example, earlier in the same chapter Tice presents contrary evidence: . . . Hazel’s actualities were transposed into professionally relevant conceptual currency. She was not allowed to be a speaking subject who had connectivities, interpretations, and self-definitions, but was portrayed instead under a set of descriptions not of her own making. (Tice, 1998: 85)
Through sifting and reshuffling the case records from several prominent social service agencies, Tice identifies two types of early TR case recording: tales of detection and protection. Tales of detection reveal a disciplinary agent who uses moral authority as an ‘instrument of social discipline’. Drawn from everyday ‘signifiers of face, appearance, family history, housekeeping and physical examinations’ (Tice, 1998: 123), social workers compiled probative evidence. In tales of protection, however, Tice points to a compassionate social worker, one who builds trust and friendship, believing that a good relationship overrides the ‘heavy-handed’ approach. Regardless of the kind of tale, Tice argues that social workers write their white middle class subject position onto the client and into the record. In a very interesting chapter, Tice shows how case records were used not only to write client subjectivity. Texts were also deployed to persuade a wary public of social work’s usefulness – Chapter Six, ‘Tales of Accomplishment’. Fundamental to the process of becoming a profession is the acquisition of public support (see Abbott, 1988). Tice effectively shows how case material was rewritten for the public as dramatic story, morality play, and scientific exhibit. And surely scientific casework was about attempts to claim professional jurisdiction over chronic poverty, illness, and social maladjustment. Drawing from the public discourse data, Tice’s conclusion that social workers used case recording methods to morally monitor clients is a convincing one, a conclusion others in this historical genre also reach.2 Under the Cover of Kindness
Leslie Margolin (1997), in Under the Cover of Kindness, reverses the idea that social workers innocently help. He marshals data from case records and academic writings to criticize the function and practice of 19th- and 20th-century US social work. Professional social workers control the poor through their unique, ubiquitous, and largely unconscious discourse on helping and kindness. Margolin examines the birth of social work, its ‘aggressive’ phase, and recent ‘new excuses’
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 167
Floersch Investigating Use of Theory in Practice ■ 167
for its perpetuation. The first four chapters do the work of illustrating the ‘social work gaze’, that is, its ‘scientific’ casework method. Through close readings of early social work writing (largely academic) and case records, Margolin argues that social work’s scientific origins coincide with the moral, political, and social need to investigate 19th-century urban poverty. And because investigation can be an onerous task, social workers codified ‘sympathy and friendliness . . . to gain entry into private places’ (Margolin, 1997: 23). Home visits (surveillance) became ‘social work’s totem [TR] technique, corresponding to the psychometric test of the psychologist or the physician’s prescription’ (Margolin, 1997: 26). The misuse of ‘emotional support’ to gain access to client information became a source of Orwellian doublethink: social workers formulated a casework method that consciously used friendliness to investigate unconventional and suspicious behavior while at the same time ‘forgetting’ that such manipulation was itself suspicious. The invisible and secret aspects of client lives were transformed into scientific ‘facts’ through biographical social histories recorded in case records. Moreover, the ruse was hidden from social workers by a process of selfmystification (Margolin, 1997: 60). Margolin argues that social work continued to ‘penetrate’ the ‘hard-toreach’ even after its first, self-reflective, post-war phase. For example, the profession blamed the poor for societal failures and assisted (in the 1950s) psychiatrists in carrying out thousands of scientific lobotomies, all in the name of ‘helping’. Then, in the 1960s, social workers discovered ‘empowerment’, a ‘brilliant strategy’ (Margolin, 1997: 120) to ensnare new clients. But social workers were never fully conscious of scientific casework functions. They became unwitting victims: ‘Whatever system of rules and obligations is operating here originates neither in the social worker nor in the client but in the discourse itself ’ (Margolin, 1997: 134). The social work discourse, its technicalrational methods, is for Margolin a power-over entity that has no associated countervailing practice. Are there practice powers that can resist the casework method’s disciplinary gaze? Stated differently, are there no counter-regulating practices and ideas independent of technical-rational models or ‘how-to’ manuals? This question has more than historical significance; social workers today, perhaps in unparalleled ways, ubiquitously use the home visit in numerous kinds of community-based interventions. I presume that Margolin’s answer to this question is no; social work is just artifice, it has no counter-disciplinary gaze. But since social workers are so clever at hiding intentions, as Margolin claims, why are they not equally capable of disguising case records? And if they are experts at masquerading kindness, then how do practitioners hide intentions? It is not likely that a textbook would explicitly instruct social workers to assume a state’s handmaiden role in casework functions. Therefore, Margolin must investigate other traces of practice to discover how workers might deceive. Perhaps,
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 168
168 ■ Qualitative Social Work 3(2)
practitioners use KIA to deceive; or equally possible, they use KIA to resist the regulatory functions of TR. Margolin cannot assume the latter, however, because he does not have a concept that ‘sees’ knowledge-in-action. When scholars ignore the unique work of KIA, practice becomes a mirror copy of the TR. In sum, Margolin methodologically limits his analysis (see Wakefield, 1998: 567) to social work texts (excluding reference to actual events) and he must read social work actions as a mirror of technical-rational methods. Margolin needs a method for discerning artifice from authenticity and his Foucauldian analysis is limited by a kind of methodological holism (Archer, 1995: 3), deductively reducing two aspects of practice (i.e. KIA + TR) to just one whole, (i.e. technical-rational).
HISTORICAL METHODS AND THE STUDY OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE Historians investigate one or several empirical sites – diagnostic assessments, progress notes, medical records, clinical case reports, journals, and textbooks – where practitioners write about interventions and record outcomes. Such investigation would yield few results if practitioners did not inscribe into written texts a recognizable TR paradigm, like casework, case management, family therapy, behavioral therapy, cognitive therapy, psychodynamic therapy, and narrative therapy. Historical methods are productive when studying how different fields of practice – community support service, child welfare, mental health, or substance abuse – have adopted one or another paradigm (or combinations). And when the written narratives do record a practitioner’s paradigm, records are useful data sources for studying the myriad ways paradigms are disseminated or not. Moreover, such methods can investigate how countries, cultures, and regions have used different or similar kinds of TR knowledge, related practitioners and power relations. Tales of Wayward Girls and The Psychiatric Persuasion (Lunbeck, 1994) illustrate, for example, how casework and psychiatric social work were formed in the early decades of 20th-century USA. Indeed, much of the recent historical work (see notes) on social work practice enriches the profession. Although written narratives – academic and practitioner texts – are rich historical objects to make an empirical inquiry of, an important question arises: what part(s) (TR and KIA) of social work practice does the written text represent? In a recent work in anthropology, Silverstein and Urban (1996) write that ‘to equate culture with its resultant texts is to miss the fact that texts (as we see them, the precipitates of continuous cultural processes) represent one, “thing-y” phase in a broader conceptualization of cultural processes’ (Silverstein and Urban, 1996: 1). I have argued (Floersch, 2000) that written texts usually represent the TR component of a broader process that includes both TR and
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 169
Floersch Investigating Use of Theory in Practice ■ 169
KIA. Indeed, I believe that Tice unwittingly points to knowledge-in-action when she talks about Sarah’s ‘common-sense attributions’, which may reflect an applied parental and common-sense belief system (i.e. KIA) more than her technical-rational casework training. On this matter,Tice revealingly calls Sarah’s demeanor ‘parent-like’. If she had methodologically included the concept KIA, Tice could have used it to explain the ambiguities that the written text served up to her analysis. For example, Tice concluded that Sarah was not ‘the heavyhanded agent of social control so often portrayed in accounts of social workers’ (Tice, 1998: 96). In this instance, was Sarah using her KIA as a counter-discursive force? Historical inquiries are unable to answer this question without a methodology that adequately accounts for how practitioners use both TR and KIA. In my study of case managers’ use of strengths (i.e. TR) case management (Floersch, 2002), I concatenated oral and written narratives of the same practice event and discovered that KIA is invisible to the researcher unless one investigates the practitioner’s oral narratives. Although I concluded that oral narratives are sites for both TR and KIA, my study suggests that written texts only record technical-rational work. KIA is activity dependent and to the extent that practitioner activity unfolds over time, we must have methods to study practice in process (Berlin and Marsh, 1993: 75). Ethnographic and participant-observation methods provide important tools for the study of KIA (Floersch, 2004; Goldstein 1994; Hall, 2001). I think it is possible to approximate a copy of actual practice by utilizing methods that juxtapose the written with the oral narrative of practice events. Furthermore, in doing so, we can methodologically identify what part of practice (KIA or TR) the written actually represents. And until the oral and written accounts are consistently compared, we cannot know what the written reliably and validly represents. Therefore, combined with historicalsociological inquiry, we also need ethnographies of social work practice, which would compare the oral with the textual production of clients. Ethnographic studies of social work (Connolly, 2000; De Montigny, 1995; Floersch, 2002; Pithouse, 1987; Rhodes, 1991; Rowe, 1999; Townsend, 1998; Wagner, 1993) are able to investigate the situated, the personal, the strategic, or the work of knowledge-in-action. Lorna Rhodes’s ethnography of psychiatric hospital workers makes this very point. She writes, The second component of the staff ’s situated [KIA] knowledge was their resistance to the knowledge of medicine and the discipline of the unit. This resistance was oblique, not opposed as ‘truth’ to some sort of singular oppressive power, but developed at an angle to the expected definitions of situations. The staff were cunning, devious, and actively ignorant in moving among the threads of power on the unit, taking advantage of areas of invisibility. They redefined their work to emphasize its contradictions; they redefined patients into categories of their own making; they resisted administrative rules. Their situated knowledge
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 170
170 ■ Qualitative Social Work 3(2)
[KIA] involved a double vision, keeping in sight what was expected while looking, as well, at what was specific, partial, and visible only from where they stood. (Rhodes, 1991: 174)
In sum, research methods are needed to investigate both types – TR and KIA – of practitioner work. And by discovering which is most likely to be written, then we can confirm the type of practice power the written text represents. The work of TR is to ‘see’ the general. The work of KIA is to particularize, to bring the theory face-to-face with reality. And in theorizing practice as a double determination, or as Rhode’s ‘double vision’, we preserve the practitioner’s autonomy to see holistically, that is, to see the particular in context of the general (Fook, 2002: 87; Harrison, 1987; Schön, 1983). I think the tendency to discover social work’s negative controlling functions (Tice and Margolin, for example) is due to the historian’s sole dependence on case records or written texts. Many scholars, eager to use Foucault to demonstrate the power of ‘the gaze’, use the written text to deduce much more worker ‘objectivity’ than is warranted. I think Foucault pointed to this problem when he noted the difference between the ‘universal’ and the ‘specific’ intellectual (Rabinow, 1984: 66–75). The universal intellectual applies technical-rational schemes in order to universalize, while the specific relies on the particularity of knowledge-inaction. Foucault used the social worker as an exemplar of the specific intellectual; he, however, did not develop the insight (for further discussion of Foucault’s view on social work see Chambon et al., 1999: 83–97). When investigators of social work practice find that TR produces social conformity and reduces client freedom, we must then wonder about the possibility of practitioner resistance and empowerment. But this is why one should not pre-load research with the one-sided view that practitioners produce their effects through a singular use of TR; if TR had absolute power, practitioners would have long ago produced the ideal subject position.
BETWEEN TR AND KIA IS A PRACTICE GAP IN SEARCH OF A METHODOLOGY Professionals utilize at least two types of knowledge in practice settings: technical-rational (i.e. textbook) and knowledge-in-action (i.e. invented, situated, tacit, or practical). The relationship between TR and KIA cannot be deductively determined; each practice setting must be empirically studied. Any recognizable difference in practitioner use of TR and KIA can be considered a practice gap (Fook, 2001: 82). And when a specific kind of practice gap is recognizably (to practitioners and researchers) reproduced in numerous settings, then extrinsic factors – like policy, funding, and culture – are acting to close what is essentially an open process.
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 171
Floersch Investigating Use of Theory in Practice ■ 171
To study practice gaps, I propose a research methodology that collects oral and written narratives. The methodology should be used for those projects specifically seeking to understand the interplay between TR and KIA. Through interviewing administrators and practitioners and in examining organizational narratives (i.e. memos, training manuals, etc.), the first procedure identifies the organization’s or practitioner’s normative technical-rational knowledge (and associated language). This step names the type of TR practitioners say they use and write about. In Meds, Money, and Manners, I examined case manager treatment plans, progress notes, and psychiatric medical records. I also read agency memos, training manuals, and quarterly reports. The first step requires the investigator to name the TR and identify what is generally known about it. For example, volumes have been written about case management, so I first investigated and identified how ‘strengths’ was uniquely adopted at the site of my study; in this instance, 9 out of 10 managers had been trained in the strengths model. Second, the researcher uses participant-observation (i.e. ethnographic) methods to study those practice events where practitioners are most likely to use their technical-rational knowledge. Here the oral narratives of specific practice events are collected through field notes and audio recordings, whichever is the least intrusive. During actual worker and client interaction, I found it too intrusive to use an audio recorder; however it was less so in team meetings and case conferences where managers, social workers, psychiatrists, and nurses discussed client cases. Third, the investigator identifies and collects the written narrative that specifically refers to the practice event that was observed in the second step. I, for example, sifted through case records and matched the date and interaction of participant-observation data with the progress note that described the same event, yet often from a strengths case management (TR) point of view. Fourth, by contrasting and comparing the oral and written narrative of the same practice event, the investigator identifies the technical-rational and the knowledge-in-action language. Meanwhile, following the identification of the practitioner’s TR and KIA language, the researcher examines how each discourse is dispersed among the oral and written narratives; it was the latter that allowed me to report that managers’ KIA language was not inscribed into the written progress note. Indeed, the oral narrative may be the exclusive site for the practitioner’s KIA. Andrew Pithouse’s (1987) participant-observation of case workers led to a similar finding: Social workers, like all of us, must establish the bases for their activities. They routinely do so through the medium of talk. They, like most of us, are not professional theorists of the social structure of group and individual processes. In this respect their oral traditions are typically bereft of a technical or medical vocabulism. They do not employ some arcane argot; like most of us they live in
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 172
172 ■ Qualitative Social Work 3(2)
a broader collective than the work setting. They apply the language of their broader membership to express the common-sense theory of doing social work. (Pithouse, 1987: 104)
Fifth and near the end of a project, and as a form of methodological triangulation, research participants are interviewed to confirm whether or not the language the researcher identifies as TR and KIA is a language the practitioner acknowledges. In my work, I wanted to be sure that my methods had not misrepresented practitioner KIA language. This step provides a validity check by testing findings against the research subject’s point of view, thereby checking whether or not ‘the phenomena are properly labeled’ (Kirk and Miller, 1986: 21). In other words, are the written and oral data indexed (coded) to a language that distinguishes TR from KIA, and is the strategy (researcher[s] + research subject) for identifying the codes replicable? Applied, this step provides a structure for conducting comparative studies of practice settings, resulting, hopefully, in identification of their respective powers and liabilities and in general knowledge about their interaction. The sixth methodological step has no prescribed map because it depends on the practice setting and the research question; the general idea is to use thematic or content analysis (Fook, 2002: 89) and place practitioner events into meaningful categories. I found, for example, that case management data fell neatly into the categories medication, money, and social manners. Once categories of practice activity are identified (e.g. assessment, intervention, and termination), then it is useful to illustrate, describe, and compare how practitioners variously use KIA and TR to conduct work in the identified categories. This data-analytic strategy produces a representation of how the use of KIA and TR depends on the context of work, allowing the researcher to account for contextual variation in their interplay. The final methodological step provides opportunities for intra-national, inter-national, and inter-regional comparison. Here, the researcher applies social theory (e.g. social class, gender, ethnicity, organization, welfare state, etc.) to explain why the particular research setting produced the kind of knowledge configuration (TR + KIA) that was empirically discovered. By identifying specific knowledge configurations, investigators could then index these to different nation-state, regional, or international policy environments. For example, I used Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory to explain the displacement of the mental hospital in the USA by showing how the policy of deinstitutionalization required the national rise and implementation of a new field of practice called community support services, a new case management (TR) paradigm, and a new worker, the case manager. However, when working to keep people out of hospitals and in communities, I also discovered that a single case management theory could not do all the work that a manager needed.
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 173
Floersch Investigating Use of Theory in Practice ■ 173
Indeed, the policies of deinstitutionalization produced a practice gap unique to the case management of severe mental illness. And as a consequence, managers invented a specific type of KIA, which made up for the TR’s failure to do certain kinds of everyday work. Still, practitioner use of KIA will likely vary by regional policies that affect implementation of different case management (TR) models: Assertive Community Treatment, Psychiatric-Rehabilitation, and Broker. In contrast to strengths, I speculate that other management models would produce different kinds of practice gaps, creating the inter-regional differences that currently exist throughout the USA. This seven-step methodology is grounded in social science assumptions and allows researchers to study practice in process, in open systems, in its holistic (Shaw and Gould, 2001: 7) totality (TR + KIA) and without reducing one to the other; it presupposes that TR and KIA have unique powers and liabilities. The proposed data collection and analytic strategy is crucial because it asks researchers to remain open to discovery; KIA may be reflexive, resistant, or it may complement the TR. I concluded that managers did not use their KIA to resist or undermine the general policies of suburban community support services. Moreover, manager use of strengths produced positive and negative (i.e. objectifying) outcomes. Because of unique social, political, or economic policies, the autonomy and resistance functions of KIA may not be actualized in contexts where practice is dominated by TR; the state of Kansas mandated the use of strengths case management, for example (Floersch, 2002: 61–82). It is conceptually lopsided to report a negative ‘social control’ finding without also accounting for the type of counter-regulation that practitioner’s KIA may produce. And so it is necessary to study how the two types of knowledge produce their effects in open system, practice environments. They can perform complementary work or work against each other. The KIA, for example, may be a site for resistance; however, the latter is always an empirical question. Consequently, to conclude with confidence that social workers act negatively when controlling client subjectivity (e.g. Tice and Margolin), or positively when producing transformation or emancipation, at least two data requirements must be met: (1) the TR data demonstrate a social conformity or transformative effect; and, (2) the KIA data demonstrate a social conformity or transformative effect. A negative example would be a social welfare policy that legally discriminates by race, which is then backed up by TR and KIA data showing how workers actually used welfare benefits to produce racial discrimination (see Joel Handler’s classic The Coercive Social Worker).
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 174
174 ■ Qualitative Social Work 3(2)
CONCLUSION For the purpose of putting theory into practice, technical-rational knowledge is codified by its founders; it is, therefore, relatively fixed. Today, intervention researchers will often ask practitioners to remain loyal to a model’s prescriptive functions; in essence, loyalty means applying TR without recognizing the unexpected work of KIA. However, because practice occurs in a specific time and place, that is, in process and in open systems, it cannot be contained like the trapped molecules of the physicist’s laboratory. I view KIA as the component of practice that recognizes process and open systems. Like Schön, knowledgein-action deals with the ‘uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflicts’ of practice. I agree with the many (Berlin and Marsh, 1993; Fook, 2002; Gould and Taylor, 1996; Harrison, 1991) who argue that KIA is a profession’s self-defense against a policy maker, researcher, and practitioner who aim to use TR in an absolute and objectifying fashion. KIA has the potential to construct specific meanings of a practice encounter (Taylor and White, 2000). And the idea that KIA has the potential for autonomy and resistance is in contrast to the idea that TR does all the work of professional ‘seeing’, or all the work of ‘making’ cases. Studying the practice effects of TR alone produces partial knowledge; it limits our understandings of practice to the nature of TR, which functions to objectify. Researchers, like practitioners, must assume that instances can be ‘cases’ of TR; if not, TR could never function and we would not have science as we know it. Thus, it is not surprising that studies of TR repeatedly find that social work practice is objectifying, as exemplified by the two studies reviewed; after all, research or practice objectification (i.e. making an instance into a case of something) is the essential nature and work of TR. The nature of technical-rational knowledge is to objectify. KIA stands as a potential check on the practitioner tempted to apply TR in absolute fashion; such omnipotent practice would likely produce dogma or negative practice. When TR is used dogmatically, it generally produces an objectifying result. However, neither of these outcomes can be known a priori. They must always be discovered in the empirical data of oral and written narratives. Notes
1 Using case records to describe and explain social workers has been a 1990s social science preoccupation. In addition to Tice and Margolin, the following scholars have used social work case records: Mary Odem (1995) Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920; Elizabeth Lunbeck (1994) The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America; Linda Gordon (1994) Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935; Regina Kunzel (1993) Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945; Theresa Funiciello (1993) The Tyranny of Kindness: Dismantling the Welfare System to end Poverty in America; Beverly Stadum
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 175
Floersch Investigating Use of Theory in Practice ■ 175
(1992) Poor Women and their Families: Hard-Working Charity Cases; Lori Ginzberg (1991) Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century US; Andrew Polsky (1991) The Rise of the Therapeutic State; and, Peggy Pascoe (1990) Relations of Rescue:The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939. 2 See for example Kunzel (1993) and Odem (1995). References
Abbott, Andrew (1988) The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Labor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Apter, Andrew (1992) Black Critics and Kings:The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Archer, Margaret S. (1995) Realist Social Theory:The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berlin, Sharon and Marsh, Jeanne (1993) Informing Practice Decisions. New York: Macmillan. Bourgois, Philippe (1995) In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambon, Adrienne, Irving, Allan and Epstein, Laura (1999) Reading Foucault for Social Work. New York: Columbia University Press. Collier, Andrew (1994) Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy. London: Verso. Connolly, Deborah R. (2000) Homeless Mothers: Face to Face with Women and Poverty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. De Montigny, Gerald (1995) Social Working:An Ethnography of Front-line Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Floersch, Jerry (2000) ‘Reading the Case Record: The Oral and Written Narratives of Social Workers’, Social Service Review 74(2): 169–92. Floersch, Jerry (2002) Meds, Money, and Manners: The Case Management of Severe Mental Illness. New York: Columbia University Press. Floersch, Jerry (2004) ‘Ethnography’, in Deborah K. Padgett (ed.) The Qualitative Research Experience, pp. 76–96. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/International Thomson Publishers. Fook, Jan (2001) ‘Identifying Expert Social Work: Qualitative Practitioner Research’, in Ian Shaw and Nick Gould (eds) Qualitative Research in Social Work, pp. 116–31. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Fook, Jan (2002) ‘Theorizing from Practice: Towards an Inclusive Approach to Social Work Research’, Qualitative Social Work 1(1): 79–95. Forester, John (1999) The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Process. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Funiciello, Theresa (1993) The Tryanny of Kindness: Dismantling the Welfare System to End Poverty in America. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Geertz, Clifford (1983) Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Ginzberg, Lori (1991) Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century US. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Goldstein, Howard (1994) ‘Ethnography, Critical Inquiry, and Social Work Practice’, in Edmund Sherman and William J. Reid (eds) Qualitative Research in Social Work, pp. 42–51. New York: Columbia University Press.
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 176
176 ■ Qualitative Social Work 3(2)
Gordon, Linda (1994) Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935. New York: The Free Press. Gould, Nick and Taylor, Imogen (eds) (1996) Reflective Learning for Social Work: Research, Theory and Practice. Aldershot: Arena. Hall, Tom (2001) ‘Caught Not Taught: Ethnographic Research at a Young People’s Accommodation Project’, in Ian Shaw and Nick Gould (eds) Qualitative Research in Social Work, pp. 49–59. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Handler, Joel (1973) The Coercive Social Worker. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally College. Haraway, Donna (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–99. Harrison,W. David (1987) ‘Reflective Practice in Social Care’, Social Service Review 61(3): 393–404. Harrison,W. David (1991) Seeking Common Ground:A Theory of Social Work in Social Care. Aldershot: Avebury. Hess, Peg McCartt and Mullen, Edward (1995) Practitioner-Researcher Partnerships: Building Knowledge from, in, and for Practice. Washington, DC: NASW Press. Imre, Roberta (1985) ‘Tacit Knowledge in Social Work Research and Practice’, SmithCollege Studies in Social Work 55(2): 137–49. Kirk, Jerome and Miller, Marc L. (1986) Reliability and Validity of Qualitative Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Klein, Waldo and Bloom, Martin (1995) ‘Practice Wisdom’, Social Work 40(6): 799–807. Kondrat, Mary (1992) ‘Reclaiming the Practical: Formal and Substantive Rationality in Social Work Practice’, Social Service Review 66: 237–55. Kunzel, Regina (1993) Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lamphere, Louise, Ragone, Helene and Zavella, Patricia (1997) Situated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge. Lave, Jean (1988) Cognition in Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lave, Jean and Chaiklin, Seth (1993) Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lunbeck, Elizabeth (1994) The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Margolin, Leslie (1997) Under the Cover of Kindness: The Invention of Social Work. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Mullen, Edward (1983) ‘Personal Practice Models’, in A. Rosenblatt and D. Waldfogel (eds) Handbook of Clinical Social Work, pp. 623–49. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Odem, Mary (1995) Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Pascoe, Peggy (1990) Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in The American West, 1874–1939. New York: Oxford University Press. Pithouse, Andrew (1987) Social Work:The Social Organization of an Invisible Trade. Aldershot: Avebury. Polsky, Andrew (1991) The Rise of the Therapeutic State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
05 floersch (mrw/d)
30/4/04
1:18 pm
Page 177
Floersch Investigating Use of Theory in Practice ■ 177
Rabinow, Paul (1984) The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books. Rhodes, Lorna (1991) Emptying Beds:The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Richmond, Mary (1917) Social Diagnosis. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Rogoff, Barbara (1990) Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press. Rowe, Michael (1999) Crossing the Border: Encounters Between Homeless People and Outreach Workers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sayer, Andrew (2000) Realism and Social Science. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Schön, Donald (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think Action. New York: Basic Books. Scott, Dorothy (1990) ‘Practice Wisdom: The Neglected Source of Practice Research’ Social Work 35(6): 564–8. Scott, James (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shaw, Ian and Nick Gould (2001) Qualitative Research in Social Work. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Silverstein, Michael and Urban, Greg (1996) The Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stadum, Beverly (1992) Poor Women and Their Families: Hard-working Charity Cases. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Sternberg, Robert and Horvath, Joseph (1999) Tacit Knowledge in Professional Practice: Researcher and Practitioner Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Taylor, Carolyn and White, Susan (2000) Practising Reflexivity in Health and Welfare: Making Knowledge. Buckingham: Open University Press. Tice, Karen (1998) Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Townsend, Elizabeth (1998) Good Intentions Overruled: A Critique of Empowerment in the Routine Organization of Mental Health Services. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wagner, David (1993) Checkerboard Square: Culture and Resistance in a Homeless Community. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Wakefield, Jerome (1998) ‘Foucauldian Fallacies: An Essay Review of Leslie Margolin’s Under the Cover of Kindness’, Social Service Review 72(4): 545–87. Zeira, Anat and Rosen, Aaron (2000) ‘Unraveling “Tacit Knowledge”: What Social Workers Do and Why They Do it’, Social Service Review 74(1): 103–23.
Jerry Floersch is an assistant professor of social work at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of Meds, Money, and Manners:The Case Management of Severe Mental Illness and is currently conducting research on youth subjective experience of psychotropic treatment; he has a forthcoming (2005) book with Columbia University Press, On Being and Having a Caregiver. [email:
[email protected]]
