Between empowerment and discipline: Practicing contractualism in social work

Abstract

SummaryAs a contemporary development in welfare policy, contractualism stipulates discretionary rights and obligations for each client, some of whom are quite vulnerable. The contractual design promotes empowerment, but entails sanctions for non-compliance. This article investigates how rationales of empowerment and discipline shape social work practice and uses a Foucauldian governmentality perspective to investigate interrelations between political objectives and individual practices. Two contrasting cases are used to explicate how rationales of empowerment and discipline simultaneously operate in social work within the contractual design.FindingsWith its emphasis on clients’ responsibility and empowerment, contractualism is a subtle yet efficient mode of governance, but disciplinary actions both rely on and undermine objectives of empowerment.ApplicationsSocial workers and clients must manoeuvre complexities as they exert empowering and disciplinary practices. These rationales of governance should be explicit and subject to professional and ethical considerations in the same way as other forms of professional authority directed at reliant, vulnerable clients.