‘It’s Technical’: Textually Mediated Helping Relationships in Public Social Services

How is the helping relationship between social workers and their clients mediated by institutional practices and forms? This article explores the roles that institutional practices and documents play at the very inception of the helping relationship between social workers and voluntary clients who are mothers. Based on an institutional ethnography in a social services department in Israel, we make visible the ways in which taken-for-granted institutional practices and forms—from the outset—can inhibit the helping relationship between social workers and clients. The insights of fourteen social workers, twenty mother-clients and textual analysis of institutional forms that frame the beginning of the helping relationship are utilised as a starting point from which to explicate how institutional practices and forms shape and govern the helping relationship in social work. We conclude with a call for a more transparent and creative approach to first encounters such that institutional practices and forms are reconsidered as gateways to supportive helping relationships.