In institutional social work, decision-making is a core task that increasingly involves more than one professional as well as, frequently, the clients. Group decision-making is fundamentally different from individual decision-making in that it is an inherently social activity calling for the communicative competencies of those involved. In this article, we describe group decision-making procedures for a specific setting of German child welfare. Condensing our findings into an idealised model of decision-making, we attempt to show how communicative and interactive exigencies conflict with decision-making rationalities. We go on to discuss the consequences this conflict has on the participation of clients in the decision-making process, arguing that social workers are likely to address both rationales separately. We show that accordingly, participation in the interaction does not necessarily safeguard a partaking in the decision.

Professionals do not only, as is today widely agreed on, work to construct institutionally workable identities for their clients in interaction, they also have to carry out substantial identity work themselves. Such work can be considerably more complicated in interactions which have a triadic structure, i.e. in which professionals from two different institutions and clients interact, demanding of professionals to invoke situational identities which match their relationships towards each other as well as towards the clients. By discussing the identity work of two professionals in a care planning conference, this article traces the difficulties that such a structure presents to practitioners. In addition, it sets out to show how ethnomethodologically informed membership categorization analysis and positioning analysis, as it was developed by discursive psychology, can be combined in the analysis of social work interactions in order to shed light on the identity work of social work professionals.

Heinz Messmer is a professor for social work and child welfare at the University of Applied Sciences North Western Switzerland. He holds his Doctor of Sociology from Bielefeld University and habilitated with a work on social conflict. His recent research interests focus on institutions of child welfare, social work practice and conversation analysis. Sarah Hitzler is a faculty member at the Department of Sociology at Bielefeld University, Germany. She holds an M.A. degree in Discourse and Argumentation Studies from Amsterdam University, and has recently completed her doctoral thesis on discourse management in care planning conferences. Her research interests lie in the fields of conversation analysis, group interaction and practices in aid and welfare institutions.Correspondence to Prof. Dr Heinz Messmer, University of Applied Sciences, North Western Switzerland, Thiersteinerallee 57, CH-4053 Basel, Switzerland. E-mail: heinz. messmer@fhnw.ch AbstractThat social welfare clients ought to be looked at not as given, a priori entities, but rather as categories produced in accordance with the policies, resources and options of the institutions involved is established today as a common ground for reflexive and reconstructivist perspectives in social work research. The disestablishment of the client role, however, up to now seems to have met a blind spot. This article will present findings from a conversation analytical study based on fourteen fully transcribed care planning conferences in the context of German long-term residential childcare, concentrating on five meetings explicitly designed to terminate the service provision. We will show how long-term residential care is regularly terminated by a range of interactional strategies complementary to those of client production that can be flexibly exploited in response to institutional and political context requirements. Conversation analysis is introduced as a method that can unveil the interactive practices professionals use in order to balance the constraints of institutional social work against the needs of the individual cases.

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