View of Wooden spoons and “pulling the mom card”: A critical discourse-historical analysis of an interview with a social worker

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Critical Social Work

School of Social Work University of Windsor 167 Ferry Street

Windsor, Ontario N9A 0C5 Email: [email protected]

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information can be found at: https://ojs.scholarsportal.info/windsor/index.php/csw

Critical Social Work, 2023 Vol. 24, No. 2

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Critical Social Work, 2023 Vol. 24, No. 2

Wooden spoons and “pulling the mom card”: A critical discourse-historical analysis of an interview with a social

worker

Critical Social Work 24(2)

Kendal M. David Carleton University

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kendal David, Carleton University, 629 Dunton Tower, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6. Email:

[email protected] Acknowledgements

Thank you to both anonymous reviewers as well as the editors of Critical Social Work for your generative feedback which undoubtedly strengthened the article. Thank you also to Ross Linden-Fraser and Chloe Halpenny for your comments and writing support during the drafting stages.

Abstract

Despite increasing acknowledgement within and beyond the social work profession of our role in enacting violence against people we claim to care for and serve, discursive strategies that

rationalize and naturalize violence are endemic within social work discourse. In this article, I use critical discourse-historical analysis to examine one interview I conducted with a practicing social worker in Alberta, Canada. Grounded in an intersectional critical approach to inquiry, I elucidate how rationalization strategies for professional violence emerge in ordinary social work talk and situate one social worker’s description of her practice within a historical context of the fabrication of social work in Canada. I focus on this social worker’s reports of threatening clients with a “virtual wooden spoon” to identify linguistic and discursive patterns at play and their semiotic significance as means to rationalize and normalize professional power and control. I specifically situate the analysis within the context of social work as a story of racist, classist, and ableist violence often committed by morally exalted, wealthy, white women. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of examining discursive strategies to rationalize, dismiss or diminish violence in our everyday social work talk.

Keywords: social work research, critical social work, critical discourse analysis, discourse-historical analysis, discourse analysis

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The pursuit of social justice features prominently as a guiding principle of the social work profession in Canada and across the world (Canadian Association of Social Workers, 2005;

International Federation of Social Workers, 2014). However, the establishment of the social work profession in Canada is entangled with complex histories of classist, racist, and ableist violence. In order to effectively address and prevent social injustice, we must understand how oppressive violence operates within our practice and shapes our everyday social work talk. This research aims to critically analyze and make explicit the manifestation of power and control within the stories we tell about who social workers are and what we do.

This inquiry emerged from my master’s thesis research, in which I critically investigated the discursive construction of professional social work identity and ideology using transcripts from 22 semi-structured interviews with 11 practicing social workers in Alberta, Canada. The interviews produced a rich – even overwhelming – collection of data. Whereas my thesis offered a collective analysis of these interviews, here I have chosen to explore a single interview,

allowing me to consider its discursive implications in greater detail and with greater nuance. In this paper, I attend to one interview I conducted with Scarlett, a social worker with over 20 years of practice experience, whose responses raised particularly complex discursive realizations of power. Using the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis (Wodak, 2015), I re- analyzed this particular transcript a year after my thesis was published to examine the unique representations of social workers and clients in this interview. Specifically, I attend to the ways in which intersecting axes of power and oppression – in particular, ableism, classism, and racism – were enacted and (re)produced within the interview. The analysis found that discursive

strategies used by the interviewee serve to rationalize and naturalize the power held over clients and were illustrative of fundamental issues of power within broader social work practice. By situating the analysis of this interview within the context of social work’s history in Canada, I contend that these discursive strategies are not random, neutral, or insignificant. Rather, acknowledging, critically reflecting upon, and changing the stories we tell about who social workers are and what we do is a fundamental facet of transforming social work and redressing the classist, racist, and ableist harms we commit.

Implementing a discourse-historical approach involves the analysis of context and historical background alongside the textual and intertextual analysis of data (Reisigl, 2017;

Wodak, 2011, 2015). As such, some specific consideration of the invention of social work in Canada and relevant historical and political context is essential to situate and contextualize the discursive analysis of the interview. I begin with a brief discussion of the origins of the social work profession, focusing on important intersectional dimensions of power and oppression.

Brief Historical Context: Social Work in Canada

The fabrication of social work as a profession in Canada is deeply entangled with complex relations of gender, race, class, and disability. Although diverse approaches to care, justice, and welfare have always existed, the specific boundaries that carve out whose practices are

legitimized and recognized as “social work” have been and still are political. Although most accounts of the history of the profession in Canada cite the import of welfare programs through colonization as the “beginnings” of social work, Gray and Yellow Bird (2018) critique colonial narratives of the history of social work which “weave the myth that social work (...) is a white European innovation” (pp. 62-63). In their remarkable genealogical investigation of social work

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in the North American context, A Violent History of Benevolence, Chapman and Withers (2019) demonstrate how these colonial narratives embed whiteness and wealth into the

professionalization of social work, obscuring and even erasing diverse histories of Black and Indigenous social workers. They highlight how settler practices of care and welfare denigrated and displaced diverse culturally specific approaches practiced by Indigenous peoples prior to colonization. The authors trace how many forms of social working (i.e., “any interventions into our social world done by anyone” [p. 5]) are disqualified from constituting “social work” today (i.e., “paid work done by those who have accredited social work degrees” [p. 5]). If social workers play a “caring role in society” as Mel Gray (2010, p. 1084) and many others contend, it is imperative to ask whose practices of care are recognized and legitimized by naming them

“social work”, as well as whose caring acts are delegitimized and obscured through professionalization.

The establishment of social work as we know it in Canada today is largely a story of racist, classist, and ableist violence. Occurrences of structural violence committed by social workers have been catalogued and include: physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; segregation and institutionalization; forced sterilization, and other eugenic practices; all under the guise of providing care, support, and treatment (see, for example: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015a, 2015b, The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019), and testimonies from survivors of other forms of

institutionalization, e.g. Ben-Moshe et al., 2014; Malacrida, 2015; Rossiter & Rinaldi, 2019). It was in this context, rife with multiple forms and functions of violence, that contemporary social work practices were established in Canada.

Such systemic violence is evident in the establishment of Charity Organization Societies (COSs), one organization integral to the establishment of social work in Canada (which remains influential across the world today, under the new name of United Way). Scholars examining the history of social work in post-contact settler-colonial North America note that increased

urbanization as a result of industrialization resulted in economic and social disparities becoming increasingly apparent to “religious and secular leaders from the middle and upper classes”

(Chambon, 2013, p. 121; see also: Chapman & Withers, 2019; De Montigny, 1995; Margolin, 1997). In other words, increasing urbanization meant that wealthier settler city dwellers were confronted with witnessing poverty and social inequality. Concerns from those in socially and economically privileged positions inspired visits to the living spaces of people living in poverty, sometimes accompanied by gawking investigative reporters (Chambon, 2013; Margolin, 1997).

COSs – and later, the Settlement House Movement – emerged to respond to these social and class disparities; these organizations are typically credited as foundational sites of social work practice (often sidelining and even ignoring rich contributions of several other social reformers, especially Black and Indigenous social workers). The primary work of COSs was to organize

“friendly visits” by “ruling class volunteers [who] would visit, typically, between two and four poor families on a regular basis” (Chapman & Withers, 2019, p. 31) without providing any substantive material relief to them. As such, the “visits” fundamentally served the purpose of surveilling the poor (Chapman & Withers, 2019; Margolin, 1997).

It was not just anyone who had the appropriate demeanour, motivation, and skill to conduct such intimate visits of the poor—wealthy white women, especially of Christian faith, were considered particularly well-suited for the job. In Under the Cover of Kindness: The

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Invention of Social Work, Margolin (1997) traces how women were able to bring surveillance into the far more intimate and previously unreachable nooks and crannies of people’s lives that police, psychologists, doctors, teachers, and others were otherwise unable to access. He notes that social work’s “totem technique” (p. 26) of the home visit was refined by female social workers who could “gather the most detailed information without appearing to be doing so, (…) utilizing the familiar and accepted norms of sympathy, support, and caregiving as information gathering techniques” (p. 32). By honing techniques for establishing rapport and trust with clients, early social workers – or ‘friendly visitors’ – obscured the investigative nature of their work and the power they held to provide (or withhold) material relief, legally separate children from their families, and criminalize and institutionalize people. In short, white women were trusted and encouraged to invade poor and racialized people’s homes to purportedly heal and empower them through mere proximity to their ‘moral goodness’ (Chapman & Withers, 2019) in ways that men were not. Further, missionary beliefs and evangelical saviourism fueled white female settler social workers’ belief in their work as an “exalted occupation, a higher calling, [which was] divinely motivated” (Margolin, 1997, p. 21).

A pious commitment to white saviourism, cultural superiority, and the accompanying moral exaltation of ‘friendly visiting’ have been and continue to be important factors for social workers’ involvement in structural and interpersonal violence, including the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the legitimation of a settler colonial state in Canada, and the

institutionalization and forced sterilization of disabled people. The enforcement and operation of residential schools and child welfare programs remove and displace Indigenous children from their families and communities, the latter of which continues to this day (Blackstock, 2020) and relies on the same basic techniques of investigation and home visiting of Charity Organization Societies past (Margolin, 1997). Child welfare remains one of the central functions of social work, and Indigenous children remain considerably overrepresented in the child welfare system in Canada (Blackstock, 2020; Canadian Association of Social Workers, 2018).

Critical disability, race, and carceral scholars also highlight the role that social workers have played and continue to play in legitimizing state violence through carceral technologies like prisons, residential schools, and total institutions for disabled people under the guise of care, justice, or rehabilitation (Erevelles, 2014; Hutcheon & Lashewicz, 2020; Joseph, 2015; Linton, 2021). Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) observes that “people’s [current] fear of accessing care didn’t come out of nowhere,” pointing in particular to ‘caring’ institutions overlapping “with prison/carceral systems like residential schools, where Indigenous children were stolen, abused, and stripped of their language and culture, and where Black, brown, poor, criminalized, trans, queer, and sex working people were locked up for profit” (p. 39). In the context of this study, social work discourses (and related practices) of pathologization and criminalization become especially relevant because tactics of state control like incarceration (in all its forms) rely on rationalization strategies which construct disabled and psychiatrized people as dangerous and violent (Chadha, 2008; El-Lahib, 2016; Joseph, 2015; Poole, 2011). Ultimately, the label of

‘violent’ is reserved exclusively for clients while we simultaneously continue to deny or justify the use of violence within social work practice (Chapman, 2010; Rossiter & Rinaldi, 2019).

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From History to Present: Theoretical Foundations

This historical and political background offers important context to this study. Attending to social work’s history in Canada one characterized by racist, classist, and ableist violence means that the rigorous discursive analysis of social work texts must be explicit about these intersecting dimensions of power and oppression. It also means being clear about who has the historic and ongoing power to reinforce and uphold these systems of oppression in the name of social work, namely middle- and upper-class white women.

Grounded in a critical approach to inquiry, this research is informed by the belief that reality and knowledge are socially constructed and mediated by human engagement in power- rich contexts of social injustice (Baines, 2017; Leavy, 2017). As Leonard (1990) writes, critical theory challenges and questions “existing social and political institutions and practices and locates the sources of social problems (i.e., domination) within them” (as cited in Mullaly, 2010, p. 86). Critical theories have political and practical dimensions and are well suited to the analysis of social institutions like the social work profession. As such, my analysis of the social work profession relies on understanding our everyday talk about the profession as situated within specific historical and political contexts rife with power and injustice. Social work and social workers are not situated neutrally within the maintenance and endurance of oppression.

Methodology

This article reports on findings from the primary analysis of one interview transcript from my master’s thesis data (David, 2021), guided by the research questions: How are social workers and clients discursively constructed and represented in this text? What are the ideological implications of these representations? Guided by a critical theoretical approach that attends to diverse and mutually reinforcing systems of power and oppression, I analyzed this interview transcript using critical discourse-historical analysis.

My master’s research data consisted of transcripts from 22 semi-structured virtual interviews that I conducted with 11 registered social workers in Alberta, Canada from July to October 2020 (David, 2021). I received research ethics clearance from the Carleton University Research Ethics Board-A (Clearance #113092). Broadly, the interviews covered the topics of social work identity, professionalism, and what it means to be a social worker (see: David, 2021 for more detail about methods for sampling and data collection, including the interview guide and demographic information about all 11 participants). It is also worth noting that my positionality as a person who was trained in social work in Alberta grounded me in a similar context model (van Dijk, 2003) as the participants of this study; presumably, this means that the interviewees might have seen me as a member of the ”epistemic community” (van Dijk, 2003, p.

85) of social workers from Alberta and therefore might have assumed a degree of shared understanding with me about what it means to be a social worker. Further, I am a white

researcher who was studying a white-dominated profession, which also presumably shaped the ways that participants interacted with me throughout the interviews.

This inquiry consisted of a more focused and refined analysis of a single interview transcript, leveraging Wodak’s (2015) discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA). As a methodology, CDA has roots in critical linguistics, social semiotic theory, and

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critical theory (Machin & Mayr, 2012). Wodak (2011) describes the focus of CDA as

“fundamentally concerned with analysing opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power, and control as manifested in language” (p. 2). The discourse-historical approach is a more specific methodological branch of CDA which specifically “attempts to transcend the pure linguistic dimension [of analysis] and to include more or less systematically the historical, political, sociological and/or psychological dimension in the analysis and interpretation of a specific discursive occasion” (Weiss & Wodak, 2003, p.

22). Reisigl (2008) notes that “in order to approach various discursive features and strategies, discourse-historical analyses systematically go through five simple questions” (p. 52), which are focused on five types of discursive strategies and their emergence in the text(s) of interest. The five types of strategies and their associated analytic questions (adapted from Reisigl, 2008) include:

• Nomination/referential (i.e., how are social actors – especially social workers and clients - linguistically enacted by being named or not named in the interview transcript?);

• Predication (i.e., which traits, qualities or features are attributed to the social actors who are referred to?);

• Argumentation (i.e., how does the interviewee justify their claims?);

• Perspectivization (i.e., from whose point of view are nominations, predications, and arguments put forth?); and,

• Mitigation/intensification strategies (i.e., does the interviewee intensify arguments to signal a high degree of certainty and/or necessity, or does the interviewee mitigate arguments to signal ambiguity or trivialization?).

I conducted a sequential analysis of the text, proceeding sentence by sentence. First, I focused specifically on referential/nomination and predication strategies to identify the key social actors referred to in the text and how the interviewee attributes qualities to them. I grouped sections of the text around the social actors identified (e.g., excerpts in which the interviewee described clients which were organized together) and then conducted a more specific analysis of the predication, argumentation, perspectivization, and mitigation/intensification strategies. While using this framework to guide the sequence of my analysis, I also attended to broader linguistic elements of the text (e.g., lexical choices, metaphor analysis, and consideration of modality) and the text’s “cohesive structure” (Wodak, 2011, p. 77), as is required for critical discourse analysis.

The transcript I selected for analysis is from the second interview I conducted with a social worker called Scarlett (a pseudonym). I provide more context about Scarlett and the interview later in this article. In all interview quotes used in this article, I use italics to indicate speaker emphasis and bolded text for my own emphasis to indicate sections of the quote that I go on to further analyze and discuss. Although I discuss the full text and discursive strategies

employed throughout the interview in this article, I focus specifically on one section where Scarlett discusses her use of a particular “approach” with clients in which she threatens them with a “virtual wooden spoon”. Focusing more specifically on one section of the text (i.e., where Scarlett discusses threatening clients with a virtual wooden spoon) allowed me to conduct a more rigorous discursive analysis, drawing especially on metaphor analysis as well as consideration of modality (i.e., how the speaker uses modal verbs like ‘will’, ‘must’ or ‘should’ to indicate their

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commitment to truth [epistemic modality] or commitment to necessity [deontic modality]) to draw important connections to the historical context of the discursive features at play

The analysis I conducted revealed a rich set of findings that are illustrative of fundamental issues of power and control within social work practice and discourse. Scarlett characterizes her relationships to clients as intimate and even familial while simultaneously describing tactics of infantilizing control she enforces with the clients she holds power over. The nomination strategies Scarlett employs serve to rationalize and naturalize her function as a social worker and the control she enacts. It is important to note that these strategies are historically entrenched and normative within mainstream Western social work culture, as discussed in the introduction of this article; they are not indicative that Scarlett is a distinctly bad or cruel social worker. My analysis of this section of Scarlett’s interview is grounded in and draws upon important historical and social contexts introduced above to make explicit the ways in which violence and control are naturalized and rationalized in our everyday social work talk and practice.

Findings

Scarlett is a white woman living in a small city in Alberta, Canada who, at the time of our interviews, had been a registered and practicing social worker for over 20 years. Scarlett spent most of her career working in health care but at the time of interviewing was employed at a non- profit providing direct frontline services to clients experiencing poverty. Over the course of both interviews, Scarlett shared several stories about her past and current social work practice. The interview transcript I analyzed for this article was our second one together, where I directed the conversation around topics from the first interview that I wanted to clarify and further discuss, as well as themes that emerged in interviews with other participants.

In her second interview, Scarlett shared several anecdotes and stories about her practice and specific interactions with clients in response to my prompted questions. Although the focus of the interviews was on social workers themselves and their own personal and professional identities, Scarlett referred to clients recurrently using personalization – making frequent references to individual clients and describing them to me in detail, including sharing complex stories about individual clients and their name, age, presenting problems, history of service use, and details about their personal history. Scarlett’s descriptions sometimes even relied on

overlexicalization, which involves the excessive use of repetitive or redundant terms to give a sense of extra-completeness or extra-persuasion, and is a discursive signal that something is problematic or ideologically contentious (Machin & Mayr, 2012). This predicational

identification of clients was more detailed and specific than the other social workers I

interviewed. Rather than referring to clients using more impersonal strategies (e.g., referring to clients as a collective group, or at least without naming them), as other interviewees commonly did, the personalization and specified predicational identification signified Scarlett’s perception of closeness and intimate knowledge of her clients. Several other social actors that almost every other study participant introduced in their first interview (e.g., the Alberta College of Social Workers, the Alberta provincial government, local police) were not named or referred to by Scarlett until I introduced them in the second interview. These patterns in referential and predicational strategies set important groundwork for the analysis of Scarlett’s description of

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how and why she uses the approach of “threatening” clients with a “virtual wooden spoon” in her practice.

The Wooden Spoon

In the first interview, Scarlett told me about her current workplace culture and described how different it was from her previous job in public health care. As a function of moving from a more- to less-structured work environment, she said:

And.. and so.. coming here.. I don't have to watch what I'm saying. I don't have to.. I don't have to not be myself. I can be silly if I want to be. I can be.. I don't know. I can just completely be myself. We [social workers] call ourselves the old grandmas, because we're both grandmas, right? And so, like, like, so when I work with clients, like, (laughs) I have a virtual wooden spoon, like I threaten clients with a virtual wooden spoon.

In the second interview, I asked Scarlett to tell me more about her “virtual wooden spoon”, what it means to her, and how she uses it to “threaten clients” in her practice. Scarlett clarified that she does not wield an actual wooden spoon to threaten clients, but that she holds up her hand

pretending to hold a spoon as a means of expressing threat. Such a display of the threat of physical harm, regardless of whether Scarlett holds an actual wooden spoon or not, is a clear expression of power and control over the clients being threatened. In terms of perspectivization, in both of her interviews, Scarlett always referred to herself as the pretend-spoon-wielder, and her clients as the targets and receivers of the threats.

Scarlett quoted herself and clients in several illustrative dialogic exchanges where she enacted the wooden spoon threats. The analysis of modality within these self-reported quotes reveals a high degree of authority, expressed in particular through her use of deontic modal verbs such as the directive clause “you need to”. Machin and Mayr (2012) contend that consideration of modality is important in CDA, as “the use of modals tells us something about the [speaker’s]

identity and crucially, therefore, how much power they have over others and over knowledge”

(p. 190). Despite there being other instances in which Scarlett quoted herself using directives and exerting power over other social actors (e.g., coworkers, managers) throughout both interviews, her nomination as wooden spoon-holder was exclusively used in her reports of interactions with clients. The following excerpt is one such example:

Say I’m working with a young mom, who’s, who had maybe left domestic violence or something. And she’s trying to get on her feet and she’s trying to move forward, and she’s struggling with all of the decisions she has to make and-- but then she’s maybe renting a place that she can’t afford. And I’ll be like, “You know, you need to … you need to be realistic here. We’d all love to live in this beautiful home, but right now this is your fixed income, these are what your children’s needs are, this is what you need to be focusing on.”

So, sometimes I’ll say, “You know, I’ve got this little wooden spoon here and any time that you’re starting to think that you need to live in this, you know, $2,000 a month place, you need to picture me with my wooden spoon (laughs) and you need to try to live within your means.”

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In this excerpt, Scarlett repeatedly quotes herself as using the directive phrase “you need to” to express the client’s obligation to comply with her instructions. In the second paragraph, Scarlett refers to the wooden spoon to bolster and redirect her authority; rather than acknowledging the administrative and material power she holds as a professional social worker over clients’ well- being, she attributes the authority of her directives to the wooden spoon itself. The wooden spoon becomes a symbol of Scarlett’s professional authority, realized through the repeated use of deontic modal verbs, directives, and the redirection of power and responsibility towards the spoon. A high degree of certainty (and authority) is also expressed through epistemic modals - like in the phrases “these are your children’s needs” and “this is what you need to be focusing on”- whereby Scarlett presents this information as factual and objective rather than as a

normative and subjective assessment.

Scarlett’s references to a wooden spoon have gendered implications, which are particularly relevant given her positionality as a white woman and the dominance of white women in the invention of social work in Canada. Scarlett specifically refers to holding a “virtual wooden spoon,” but the threat could be enacted using any number of “virtual” or pretend objects, or even as the threat of hitting a client with her own hand. Scarlett explicitly addresses the semiotic significance of the wooden spoon as her pretend weapon of choice when she asked me the rhetorical question: “everybody understands the wooden spoon context, right?”

To understand the significance and context of this discursive choice more deeply, I draw on Talia Lavin’s (2021) journalistic work on corporal punishment in evangelical culture, which draws clear conclusions about wooden spoons as commonly used implements of violence—and as pervasive symbols of the threat of violence, especially in household or familial settings. The wooden spoon has specific connotations as an object of household use, compared to, for

example, a ruler, which might be more closely associated with schools and use by a teacher (to measure or to strike a pupil). Arguably, the primary use of wooden spoons is for cooking, and they are likely to be stored in a kitchen. This elucidates gendered implications of Scarlett’s choice of pretend object, which may be more closely associated with the specific threat of violence inflicted by a mother or woman who, by virtue of dominant gender stereotypes about cooking, might be more recognizable as a wielder of wooden spoons than a man or father would be (i.e., who might be more closely associated with say, belts or shoes as implements or threats of paternal violence). This is particularly relevant given the gendered history of the profession of social work discussed earlier.

“Pulling the Mom Card”

The gendered allusions of Scarlett’s reports of threats extend beyond the significance of her referred pretend object of choice. Scarlett repeatedly contextualized the particular action of threatening clients as part of an approach that she referred to as “pulling the mom card” or

“pulling the grandma card”. These turns of phrase combine two metaphors: to “pull it off” (i.e., get away with doing something you may not be supposed to or allowed to do), and to “play the [x] card” (i.e., to introduce a variable that gives you an advantage over another person). The implication that threatening clients and trying to establish herself as a maternal figure might be harmful, unethical, or professionally objectionable is reinforced in one instance when Scarlett used another metaphor to further describe her recurring turn of phrase: “we get away with murder doing that kind of stuff, like pulling the, you know, pulling the mom thing on them”. In

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this instance, Scarlett uses the expression “get away with murder” to suggest that the gendered and familial veil of the “mom card” obscures the harm she and her colleagues enact (i.e., up to the extent of “murder”) that, were it otherwise visible, might be condemned. This metaphor seems to explicitly recognize that harm is being enacted, given that it would be confusing if not antithetical to say that one is “getting away with murder” to refer to actions that are at once non- violent, ethical, and socially or professionally accepted. Scarlett’s reference to card-playing as one of the source domains of her metaphor “pulling the mom card” also harkens to idioms related to “trump cards” which have the added significance of being saved or hidden without the other person/player’s knowledge until it is a particularly advantageous moment for one to use it and gain an incontrovertible power over the other. This further reinforces the metaphor as one that cements the power and control of social worker over client, especially regarding the dominance of epistemic superiority within professional relationships.

Trivialization and rationalization strategies are realized by Scarlett’s repeated use of metaphors which rely on playing cards as a source domain, which downplay the complex and serious nature of the topic of conversation by characterizing her threats as a game. This levity in tone is buttressed by Scarlett’s own explicit description of “pulling the mom/grandma card” as

“fun”. Further realizing this trivialization strategy, when Scarlett quoted herself and clients to provide examples of her use of this tactic, she repeatedly quoted her clients as laughing in response to the threats. In fact, Scarlett’s reports of clients laughing in response to her use of the

“wooden spoon” was so disorienting to me as the interviewer that I interjected to clarify in the following exchange:

Kendal: So, it’s kind of humorous? Like it’s a –

Scarlett: Humorous. Humorous with the threat of, “you know, if I was your mother…” (laughs)

In this excerpt, Scarlett repeats her assertion from the first interview that the action is explicitly intended to express threat. She suggests that should the circumstances allow it (i.e., “if I was your mother”), she might wish to actually threaten or hit clients with a real wooden spoon. At once, she asserts that the act is intended to exert power over clients and instill fear and laughs about the ruse while drawing on images of maternal relationships to signify perceived intimacy and closeness. Scarlett also described the intention of the action as a means to “hold them accountable, but in a kind of loving way”, which aligns with her use of predicational strategies signifying perceived familiarity and care. Such “highly personalized relation with the observed”

is a familiar discursive strategy within social work, which Margolin (1997) argues is a central facet of how social workers obscure their power and authority by conceptualizing surveillance and control as “friendliness, rapport, trust, and confidence” (pp. 24-25).

Discussion

Genuine consideration of the broader historical and political context - which is a key facet of discourse-historical analysis - is essential if we wish to learn from Scarlett’s enactment of harm rather than dismiss it as unusual or exceptional. The discursive strategies that Scarlett employs are not demonstrative of an exceptionally or unusually cruel social worker seeking to inflict

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harm, but rather are a uniquely overt reflection of the power and control woven into the very fabric of the social work profession (see: David, 2021 for a discussion about how these same discursive strategies emerge in other ways in my analysis of interviews with 11 social workers in Alberta). In fact, the discursive strategies realized in Scarlett’s interview and her description of this particular “method” of doing social work bear an almost eerie resemblance to the accounts of staff members in state-run total institutions for disabled people throughout Canada and the United States.

Scarlett’s discursive framing of her relationships to clients as familial and her specific role as a social worker as maternal is an important feature of the rationalization of control enacted through infantilization. These strategies are employed in this interview transcript but also in social work discourse broadly. In their work on institutional violence in Canada, Rossiter and Rinaldi (2019) dedicate a chapter to staff accounts, focusing on how they “justify their violent conduct as care” (p. 56). Of note, their analysis demonstrates how “violence is coded as belonging to the actions of the institutionalized,” and how such coding serves to “justify the actions of those in power as the means to contain violence rather than acts of violence in themselves” (p. 62, emphasis mine). The authors analyze several public accounts of staff members who refuted and denounced institutional survivors’ first-hand reports of the harms inflicted upon them, including “profound neglect, violent and degrading forms of punishment, and, in some cases, sadistic levels of sexual and physical violence” (p. 1). Of particular relevance to the analysis of Scarlett’s interview, the researchers note that paternalism, infantilization, and the “framing device of family” (p. 63) are pervasive discursive strategies used by institution staff to rationalize violence, whereby their perception of and description of intimate connections to clients “seemed to sidestep and absolve their power imbalances, for family structure (…) necessarily carries power imbalances for the sake of ensuring children’s care and safety” (p. 63, emphasis mine). The authors demonstrate how such familial rationalization strategies not only allow staff to absolve their moral culpability but extend even into the denial and delegitimation of survivors’ accounts of the harm they experienced. This familial frame resembles Scarlett’s recurring references to motherhood to rationalize her use of the threat of violence, as well as the meaning of her reference to a wooden spoon as the symbol of her “pretend” threatening object of choice.

The relevance of Rossiter and Rinaldi’s (2019) work to my own analysis of Scarlett’s use of familial rationalization strategies is perhaps most obvious in the section of Scarlett’s second interview which immediately proceeded her description of the wooden spoon tactic. My next question asked her to tell me more about a statement she made earlier in the interview about disliking when hospital social workers wear white coats. She responded:

I’m always against anything that’s power over somebody, so I see a white coat as powering over somebody. So I don’t like to see anybody wearing a white coat to be quite honest. (….) I think it gives the perception of-- it’s, to me it’s, you know, it’s purely about power.

This excerpt highlights the ways that Scarlett is conscious of the semiotic significance of an object like a white coat but also how she fails to connect such a critique to her own power as a social worker—for example, in her use of ‘pretend’ threats of violence against clients. The strategies of rationalization that Scarlett employs in her description of this tactic are not

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individually fabricated but are emblematic of the naturalization of violence under the guise of

‘care’ within social work. As the logic goes, threatening clients with a pretend wooden spoon is not “powering over somebody” if one cares for them, is intimately familiar with them, and perhaps even considers oneself a maternal figure to them.

Conclusion

We must analyze – and resist – the rationalization and naturalization of violence in social work if we truly wish to care for and serve people as we claim to do. The historical situatedness of analysis which is required for a discourse-historical inquiry like this one creates important possibilities for social work researchers to consider the semiotic significance of what may otherwise be discounted as irrelevant or off-the-cuff descriptions of one’s relationships with clients. This discounting is worryingly common and has significant implications for social work practice. Blackstock (2020) writes of the rationalization strategies that social workers have used to justify their role in the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the specific violence inflicted on Indigenous women and children. She notes the tendency to write off stories of violence as exceptional or perpetrated not by a “normal” social worker but by the anomalous bad apple of the bunch (much like the institution staff that Rossiter and Rinaldi (2019) write about).

Indeed, the control that social workers wield is not individually contained, but rather molded by complex histories of power and oppression; understanding our individual role as one thread in the fabric of social work is an important facet of critical reflexive social work

scholarship and practice. In their harrowing article “Becoming perpetrator: How I came to accept restraining and confining disabled Aboriginal children” Chapman (2010) reflects on their own experiences rationalizing the violence they enacted in their role as a residential service worker.

Chapman’s concluding remarks urge readers to recognize our power to do harm as social workers and acknowledging when we do, arguing that these practices are important antidotes to the normalization and acceptance of violence in practice. Of their teaching practice and current work with social work students, they write: “I want them to think of the various histories we’ve read in which at times well-intentioned experts and professionals really did ruin people’s lives”

(p. 11). They conclude:

As long as there are professional helpers, and likely there will continue to be

professionals, even if we do abolish this particular hierarchical structure, those who help need to be aware of the likelihood that we will also harm. We need to become better at becoming ethical and accountable, both when those who we’re supposedly helping tell us that we’re doing harm, and when our consciences do. (p. 11)

It is essential to examine how strategies to rationalize, dismiss or diminish violence emerge in our everyday social work talk should we wish to redress the harms we have performed and do more ethical social work. The discursive strategies Scarlett employed in her interview with me to justify threatening clients are noteworthy and meaningful when read alongside the historical, social, and political context of social work practice in Canada-- especially the

legitimation of the violence of wealthy white women on racialized, poor, and disabled clients. If we wish to change our practices, we must – among other things – change the stories we tell ourselves and one another about who we are and what we do and a close and critical attention to discourse is an essential ingredient in this work.

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