The ‘service user’ label through critical constructivist lenses

Abstract

Mindful of the risk of seeming to cover ‘old ground’, this article strives to open new ground, or make old ground fresh again, by regarding the ‘service user’ label through critical constructivist lenses. Specifically, this article seeks to demonstrate how the agentive, self-determining qualities attached to ‘service users’, as opposed to ‘clients’ or ‘customers’, are complicated by more pejorative connotations ascribed to the term in everyday, social work and neoliberal discourses while highlighting how words matter. Not only do tensions between and within discourses register and generate tensions in practice, but, especially, language also constitutes social reality and the people and things making it up. Although frightening, yet inescapably ‘normal’, instances of structural violence and harsh austerity measures must be regarded in the context of discourse, albeit while not being determined by it, questioning common-sense discourses and the practices they index may produce possibilities for creating alternate languages and practices.