Entanglements with offices, information systems, laptops and phones: How agile working is influencing social workers’ interactions with each other and with families

Abstract

Agile working (flexibility about where and when practitioners do their work) is increasingly common across public sector social work, but there has been little research about how practitioners engage with it or its impacts on communication between social workers, their colleagues and the families with whom they work. This article presents findings from an ethnographic study of a children’s safeguarding social work team in an English local authority who were engaged in agile working. It draws on data from observations, local authority documents, semi-structured interviews, participant research diaries, participants’ photographs and the researcher’s photographs taken during fieldwork. An analytical frame drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of spatial dialectics and Wanda Orlikowski’s concept of sociomateriality is used to identify how agile working involves entanglements of practitioners and families with restructured office spaces, digital information systems and mobile devices such as convertible laptop–tablet computers and mobile phones. Innovations such as these are commonly understood as promoting more effective and transparent social work practice, but the study’s data show that entanglements between workspaces, digital devices and people in practice are having multiple effects, producing new hierarchies of belonging in space, shaping what can be communicated, and the ways it can be presented and received. The article argues for critical attention to the role of material space in digital and place-based innovations in social work practice.

Safeguarding adults practice and remote working in the COVID-19 era: challenges and opportunities

“…This case concerned a dispute about end of life-care arrangements, the withdrawal of clinically assisted nutrition and hydration from a 70-year-old man who was affected by stroke. Jeyasingham (2020, pp. 337-338) argues that:…”

“…The literature suggests that the benefits of remote working and virtual assessments include increased levels of practitioner autonomy, more effective use of time and improvements in effective recordings of safeguarding practice by way of making recordings of concerns visible and thus enabling and enhancing information sharing among partner agencies (Errichiello and Pianese 2016; Hunter, 2019; Jeyasingham 2020). However, these benefits appear to be outweighed by the disadvantages of lack of face-to-face contact that can more easily enable identification of risks to those experiencing abuse and neglect as well as assessments of risks in their environment.…”

“…However, these benefits appear to be outweighed by the disadvantages of lack of face-to-face contact that can more easily enable identification of risks to those experiencing abuse and neglect as well as assessments of risks in their environment. Virtual assessments also inhibit relationship building and trust (Jeyasingham, 2019; 2020). For practitioners, a number of concerns have also been identified with remote working practice and these include sense-making, the impact of co-location, the shift to virtual forms of collaboration, reduced communication between colleagues, isolation, performance management, supervision, organisational control, a lack of management oversight and transfer of knowledge among colleagues (Errichiello and Pianese 2016; Jeyasingham 2020).…”

“…Virtual assessments also inhibit relationship building and trust (Jeyasingham, 2019; 2020). For practitioners, a number of concerns have also been identified with remote working practice and these include sense-making, the impact of co-location, the shift to virtual forms of collaboration, reduced communication between colleagues, isolation, performance management, supervision, organisational control, a lack of management oversight and transfer of knowledge among colleagues (Errichiello and Pianese 2016; Jeyasingham 2020). Thacker et al (2020) also identified that remote work can inhibit curiosity in safeguarding adults practice and Jeyasingham (2020) has argued that agile working can lead to the complexities involved in building trusting relationships, being ignored, which is a key ingredient required for effective safeguarding practice (Anka et al , 2017).…”

Improving Sensemaking in Social Work: A worked example with Deleuze and Art

“…The third set of Social Work literature connects to materials and senses, through a concern with situations, how issues emerge and what moves people to action (Stepney and Popple, 2008). Some of this speaks to the material context and situations for social work, broadly relevant to Sensemaking, as discussed by Jeyasingham (2020), where practices such as agile working form “new configurations of people, things and spaces” (p.339), in which materials are more than a passive background for Social Work. More specifically, and also relevant for Sensemaking, is recognition that Social Work is an embodied practice (McCormick, 2011), in which emotions are not only important but are materialised (Rajan-Rankin, 2014).…”