Despite a consensus on the need to take culture into account in social services delivery, remarkably little data is available on the processes of culturally competent organizational development. This article addresses how workers, supervisors, and managers involved in culturally competent organizational change perceive the goals and dilemmas of these efforts during the initial stages. Data are drawn from three nonprofit child and family agencies in one metropolitan area. The data demonstrate that cultural competence means disparate and conflicting things to differently positioned members of each organization. The authors argue that conflicts may be inherent in the process of culturally competent organizational development, particularly to the extent that such efforts attempt to redistribute power in the workplace. Efforts to develop cultural competence must identify, surface, and renegotiate these conflicts.
Examining the results of the ''narrative turn'' in social work in their seminal article for Qualitative Research in 2005, Riessman and Quinney found themselves disappointed with the size and quality of the research corpus they reviewed. However, they also identified three exemplars of promising work, including the research of Faye Martin (Martin, 1998). Riessman and Quinney highlighted Martin's narrative-gathering strategy, devised on the basis of her practice experience and dubbed ''direct scribing.'' The direct scribing method of narrative data collection disciplines the work of the researcher, who becomes the ''scribe,'' and elaborates the roles of the interviewees as authors of the narratives that they create. This article on capturing (and being captured by) the narratives of marginalized young people is situated in an increasingly significant movement in the social work literature that promotes giving voice to young people, so that they may have their views taken into account. We highlight the benefits of direct scribing as a means of narrative-gathering in social work and then address the challenge of interpreting these narratives, drawing on examples from our research. We suggest connections between direct scribing and the interpretive approach of dialogic narrative analysis as a method of interpretation that requires ''letting stories breathe.'' (Frank, 2010). The aim of this contribution is to describe specific ways in which linking direct scribing and dialogical narrative analysis may contribute to the advancement of narrative research in social work, and, in particular, to the enhancement of efforts to amplify ''youth voice'' in social work policy and practice.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.