Negotiating organisational and professional feeling rules

On digital documentation and emotions in child protection social work

Dados Bibliográficos

ID13132001
AutoresTeres Hjärpe (0000-0002-3153-2646, Lund University, autor correspondente)
Ano2022
Volume5
Fascículo1
Páginas10-28
Data de publicação2022-11-16
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEmotions and Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2631-6900 • E-ISSN: 2631-6897
EditoraBristol University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1332/263169021x16667009170818
OpenAlexW4309616755
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas25

This article explores the emotional challenges of digital documentation practices in child protection social work. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Swedish social services, it explores how social workers negotiate organisational and professional feeling rules when performing child protection investigations using a digital documentation-based structure. Theoretically informed by Arlie Hochschild and other emotion sociologists’ discussions on the origins of feeling rules at work, the study concentrates on how organisational feeling rules challenge professional ideals and force situated negotiations. The documentation structure was introduced and framed as a guarantee that social workers would no longer be guided by emotions but by facts; at the same time, new emotional dilemmas arose when professionals worked according to these ideals. Negotiations between organisational and professional feeling rules were identified regarding traces of emotional work in the documentation, compliance with documentation-based routines in unpredictable client interactions, and professional (dis)satisfaction when documenting activities took time away from meeting with clients. Adding to the existing body of research, the study demonstrates that digital documentation practices deepen the increasingly ambivalent place for emotions in social work and that organisational-administrative emotional regimes are negotiated in situ with other ideals by social workers and frontline managers. By giving examples of social workers’ micro-resistance to organisational feeling rules, the study contributes theoretically with insights into the different origins of feeling rules in professional welfare work and the power (a)symmetry between them. Finally, by situating the tensions between competing ideals in everyday practice, the study adds to the understanding of technostress and emotional fatigue

Ambivalence · Documentation · Emotion work · Emotional labor · Feeling · Negotiation · Political science · Public relations · Situated · Social science · Sociology · Child Abuse and Trauma · Computer Science · Emotional Labor in Professions · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Social Work Education and Practice · Social Work