© British Association of Social Workers
Discourse Analysis and Social Relationships in Social Work
John Rodger gained his B A (Hons.) in Sociology from Leicester University and his Ph.D. from Edinburgh University. He is currently a lecturer in sociology and social policy at Paisley College, and teaches a course on the sociology of deviance to undergraduate students on the social work programme. He has published articles in the Scottish Journal of Sociology, Sociological Review, Sociology and Political Studies.
Dr John J. Rodger. Department of Social Studies. Paisley College. High Street. Paisley PA1 2BE.
Summary
Following a description of the criticism made of contract approaches from the perspective of discourse analysis, the paper draws a distinction between the focus of discourse analysis on the constitution of knowledges and the ethnomethodological project of studying how knowledgeable human beings negotiate meaning through social interaction. I argue that we need a discourse analysis grounded in social relationships. The paper then describes a number of concepts derived from Basil Bernstein's analysis of language and education with the objective of providing a perspective that can l ink an analysis of knowledge and language with the social relationships of power and control which lie at the core of practitioner/client negotiations about agreements and contracts. At the end of the paper 1 stress the importance of social workers negotiating contracts and agreements on the basis of an understanding of their client's everyday accounting systems. This specific idea is connected to the framework of classification and framing of knowledge established earlier in the paper by suggesting that it is facilitated by what the paper calls an appreciative code.