Reimagining the Human Service RelationshipEditors: Jaber F. Gubrium, Tone Alm Andreassen, and Per Koren Solvang
Publisher: Columbia University Press – 349 pages
Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram

Professionals such as health care counselors, doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, and therapists nowadays provide a wide range of services to people who need them, broadly referred to in this book as service users.

The editors – Gubrium, Andreassen, and Solvang – first point out in this insightful and revealing book that the traditional lines of demarcation between these two groups, have in recent years, been shifting. They state: “Old dichotomies are disintegrating, replaced by roles with overlapping goals and responsibilities.”

Service providers have these days become more sensitive to the “sensibilities and understandings” of service users. They also work together with other service specialists and take into account “the voices of service users” when providing services to their clients, patients, and other service users.

Secondly, the editors state that there is now “the widespread feeling that the human service provision has lost its way, that it is more concerned with systems of accountability, with rules and regulations, than it is with service and care.” They lament that “the moral terrain and working environment of both service providers and service users have been overshadowed by administrative imperatives.”

The three editors named above – who have backgrounds in sociology, social work, health care, rehabilitation, and related areas – and 19 other specialists, look in this important book, into the social, organizational, and policy aspects of the service relationship, and by providing case studies, ethnographies, and qualitative research examples, tie theory with practice. They’ve organized their compiled materials and present them with this outline:

  1. Part I. The Human Service Relationship
    1. From the Iron Cage to Everyday Life
  2. Part II. Service User Perspectives
    1. Professional Intervention from a Service User Perspective
    2. Expertise and Ambivalence in User-Focused Human Service Work
    3. Flipping the Script: Managing and Reimagining Outpatient Addiction Treatment
    4. Service Users’ Negotiated Identity in a Social Enterprise and the Opportunity for Reflection in Action
    5. Between Control and Surrender in Terminal Illness
  3. Part III. Professional Work
    1. New Relations Between “Professionals” and Disabled Service Users
    2. The Use of Elder-Clowning to Foster Relational Citizenship in Dementia Care
    3. Managing the Complexity of Family Contact in Child Welfare
    4. Risk, Trust, and the Complete Sentiments of Enacting Care
    5. “Civil Disobedience” and Conflicting Rationalities in Elderly Care
  4. Part IV.  Reimagined Service Relationships
    1. Mental Health Self-Knowledge: Crossing Borders with Recovery Colleges and Tojisha Kenkyu
    2. Tension and Balance in Teaching “The Patient Perspective”
    3. Reimagining the Doctor-Patient Relationship
    4. Who’s Who and Who Cares? Personal and Professional Identities in Welfare Services
    5. Border Work: Negotiating Shifting Regimes of Power

This is an excellent book that carefully looks into important aspects of the present-day relationship between service providers and service users, and it presents ideas on how re-imagine it towards transformation, to make it more effective and useful.

 

Editors:

Jaber F. Gubrium is professor of sociology at the University of Missouri. His most recent books are Turning Troubles into Problems: Clientization in Human Services (2014) and The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research (2012).

Tone Alm Andreassen is professor and head of research for the interdisciplinary program in care, health, and welfare at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences.

Per Koren Solvang is professor of rehabilitation at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences.