Le quotidien du travail sur autrui dans une société de l'autonomie. Les cas d’un service d'accompagnement socioéducatif et d’une Maison d’enfants intervenant dans « l’intérêt de l’enfant »
(2023)
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- Abstract
- (en) This thesis examines how social workers (psychologists, educators, animators, sociologists, child caregivers, psychomotor therapists) from two Brussels-based services - a socio-educational support service (SASE) and a Children's Home (hereinafter referred to as "the Maison") - mandated or authorized to intervene "in the child's best interest," engage in their work when assisting individuals who may not necessarily seek help or cooperate willingly. In our liberal-individualistic societies, which place moral importance on individuality and autonomy (Ehrenberg, 2012), working with others ideally involves "accompanying" or "working with" the beneficiaries, promoting their autonomy as much as possible, and seeking to avoid the use of coercion, or at least, using it as a last resort. However, this ideal is often challenged in practice. Social workers are often torn between conflicting demands they must reconcile: protecting despite the individual's wishes, or working with their consent? Offering unconditional support or encouraging participation? This thesis takes on the subject of this "impossible profession," drawing on Freud (i.e., helping the person to help themselves), who argued that resolving these dilemmas is particularly challenging due to the singular and complex nature of each situation. Social work is characterized by a strong conjectural component inherent in "prudential practice professions" (Champy, 2015), which requires professionals to face uncertainty. The thesis aims to confront the macro-hypothesis of a society based on "autonomy as a condition" with how it is practiced in real-life situations: How do social workers from two different intervention contexts (specialized assistance and general social assistance) attempt to reconcile what they are obligated to do with what they actually do, given the unpredictable circumstances they may encounter, in a social context that values autonomy as a set of interconnected values? This framing of the issue highlights the necessity of understanding that autonomy, rather than being empirically observable, is a social expectation and a value idea that structures - at least initially hypothesized - the relational configurations in which professional interventions take place.It should be noted that this thesis does not definitively state what a society based on "autonomy as a condition" is, but rather, in a more modest manner, it contributes to shedding light on the debates surrounding a society based on autonomy as a condition, with grounded insights. The research is ethnographic and relies on the observation of weekly team meetings in the two services (and sometimes ongoing activities in the case of the Maison, such as parenting support sessions, language workshops, and pedagogical days), as well as informal exchanges with the teams. It also involves a series of comprehensive interviews with various members of the teams. The study demonstrates that different intervention contexts (spontaneous help for general social assistance [the Maison] and voluntary or coerced assistance for specialized assistance [SASE]) correspond to different target groups, with varying levels of demand, and consequently, substantially different ways of intervening. Not all beneficiaries have voluntarily chosen to seek help, and not all workers face the same pressures or have the same possibilities of intervention in terms of the degree of coercion. While social workers in both general social assistance and specialized assistance share a common socially established activity - intervening with others - they do so in two different contexts. The cases of SASE and the Maison illustrate the shared and distinct challenges they face when seeking to promote change in others while respecting autonomy, meaning the consent of the individual. This comparison also makes visible, through contrast, the similarities in how professionals from both services handle "professional challenges" (Ravon & Vidal-Naquet, 2018). It shows that these different resources, based on the constitutive rule of autonomy, allow professionals to define roles, know who is who, and assign duties and responsibilities. They determine who should say or do what to whom, under what circumstances, and in what manner, etc. In essence, these resources provide not only meaning (identifying what the problem is, which role is played by whom, who is responsible for the difficulty and the solution, etc.) but also ways of adopting the appropriate course of action and constantly evaluating the legitimacy of specific decisions. The thesis also reveals a mirror effect between the rules that social workers want to follow when intervening with beneficiaries and the rules they wish to follow when working as a team. The different language games used to give meaning, act, and justify their interventions with their clients closely resemble - sometimes quite closely - the ones they employ to try and work as a team. This quest for more equality and respect for the consent of others also drives many discussions about their ways of wanting to work together in sociocracy or shared governance.
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Citations
Messaoudi, F. (2023). Le quotidien du travail sur autrui dans une société de l’autonomie. Les cas d’un service d’accompagnement socioéducatif et d’une Maison d’enfants intervenant dans « l’intérêt de l’enfant ».