This document summarizes Nikolas Rose's examination of the rise of psychotherapeutic and social care cultures. It discusses how these cultures involve "governmentality" and exercise a therapeutic authority to legitimize power. Therapies are sought when individuals feel unable to bear the obligations of choice. The document also examines power relations in social worker-client relationships. Social workers control aspects like time, location and resources, establishing power vectors. Social work can also take social issues and construe them as private problems, aiming to normalize people according to dominant ideologies. It discusses how social work forms certain types of selves and identities through its techniques and technologies of care and governing conduct.

1. Stephen A. Webb
Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland

2. Nikolas Rose examined the rise of psychotherapeutic and
social care cultures. Using the work of Foucault he showed
how they involved in a kind of micro-power or what he
called "governmentality"
A whole range of governors of conduct in our own culture -
social workers, nurses, even prison officers - give their
authority legitimacy because it has undergone a kind of
therapeutic mutation. They exercise a therapeutic authority,
and this gives it a new ethical basis, a way of legitimating
itself at a time, and in a climate, in which all authority has
to justify the authority which it wields

3. Link between power and the ethics of self as a
latter day form of spiritual guidance.
“I suggest that the rise of the psychotherapies as
techniques of spiritual guidance is intrinsically
bound to this injunction that the self must become
the subject of choice in its everyday life, in order to
realise its potential and become what it truly is.
Therapies are sought out by individuals when they
feel unable to bear the obligations of choice. Or
individuals are directed to therapy where others
consider them to be unable to exist as responsible
choosing selves” (Rose).

4. Power in social worker-client relations - Types of Power
Social workers don’t really need a sociologist to come
along and point out the power relations in these
practices, because in many ways they are obvious -
which doesn’t mean to say they are not important.

5. Social work is a relations of clienthood.
In order to enact this activity called direct work, one person
characteristically travels to another persons place of work.
One person controls the time, the frequency, the physical
location, the layout of the room in which the activity
occurs. These features of the situation already establish
certain vectors of power. Of course, there are some case
when the social worker travels to the client, but apart from
home visits this is usually when the client is in confinement
in a mental hospital or in a prison.

6. Money or resources are usually at stake. Social
work may seem to be freely given as the help of one
person for another who is suffering. But social care
is contractualized. There is a lot that could be said,
and indeed has been said, about the role that
money and resources plays within the social
worker client relationship. Some literature argues
that the resource or financial relation disguises a
relation of inequality and power, if not
exploitation.

7. Social work involves a kind of power that might be termed
priestly. One person confesses and is known. The other
does not, remains secret, mysterious, merely hears the
confession. This kind of relation involves what Pierre
Bourdieu terms ‘symbolic violence’. One person has the
capacity to reshape the meanings through which the other
makes sense of their life and their actions. This is often
done through a highly specialised and technical language,
or an affective language that invokes notions of feelings,
well-being and individual progression.

8. Social work turns public and social ills in to private woes.
This type of criticism was very powerful in the 60s and 70s,
where it centred in particular on the depoliticizing effect of
social work. It takes problems that are the consequence of
the damage wrought by social and political disadvantage,
by cultural or ethnic discrimination or oppression, and
often construes them as private, individual difficulties
amenable to solutions by working upon the damaged
individual or family rather than the things doing the
damage.

9. Social work aims to normalize people into neat
categories that conform to requirements of a
dominant ideology. Increasingly it tries to do this
through the use of scientific techniques. Social
work experts are therefore dealing directly with
fundamental ethical judgements and questions
about how people should live. These can involve
very physical and material things related to
hygiene, cleanliness, or more complex emotional
aspects relating to how people ought to relate to
each other.

10. A stronger claim is that social work is significantly
involved in forming or constructing certain types
of "self" or individuality. Its' languages, techniques
and types of authority, have actually played a
significant role in making us up as certain kinds of
self. The kind of persons that we now take
ourselves to be are tied to a kind of project of our
own identities: we are to live, and to discover our
identity as a matter of our own freedom.

11. This is a process that is embodied in the practice
and policy of social work that entails the reduction
of difference to a common gold standard (good
enough parenting, healthy attachement and well-
being). It effectively means the reduction of
difference. It is this de-differentation between the
boundaries and specializations of social work,
between meaning and outcome, surface and
depth, high and low values, which leads to a
reconstruction of both social work and the "life-
world" of clients.

12. Language, then, is crucial in this matter of power
and influence in social work. But social work is
more than just language. It is a technology of care.
That is social work regulates people's lives by
getting us to find new ways of working on
ourselves in a rather practical kind of way. Michel
Foucault took confession as it operated within the
apparatus of priestly power in the Catholic
Church, as a rough model of the type of
technology in the therapies (Foucault, 1979).
Confession, Foucault argued, was a practice of
subjectification.

13. Here social work is involved in what might be called the
psychologizations of the mundane. A whole range of
everyday matters have been made in to psychological
affairs, that is to say, matters which are discussed and
understood in a therapeutic language. It is not just the rise
of counselling in general, or even marriage guidance
counselling, or sex counselling. There is counselling for
debt, for diet, around reproduction, childbirth and a whole
array of matters which are to do with the minutia of how
one leads a life. These have become rephrased in social
work languages and judgements, which have permeated
way beyond the consulting room, onto television, radio,
into the newspapers and magazines.

14. Social work regulates the individual self through a variety
of techniques. It does not merely equip people with a
certain language (rights-claims, feelings talk). It does not
merely equip people with a certain way of disclosing and
accounting for their inner world or making it bearable in
certain ways. Social work also equips clients with certain
techniques for acting upon themselves in order to reform
themselves. Social work by providing people with certain
ways of reflecting upon themselves, enjoining people to
reflect upon themselves, to interpret their actions, their
conduct and their words in particular ways and to bring
them forth in particular situations, is giving people a
‘mental technology’ for acting on their life in thought, and
so perhaps in action.

15. We can identify four technologies
of care that social work is engaged
with via its interventions

16. Techniques of engaging with the self: an
epistemological mode, for example, which
searches for past determinants of present states, an
interpretative mode, in which the word or act is
understood in terms of its significance in relation
to other parties to the interaction, a descriptive
mode which seeks to fix attention on conduct
dissected into micro-competencies such as
grooming, bathing, eating, eye-contact which can
be recorded, normalised and made the subject of
pedagogies of social skills.

17. Techniques of disclosing the self: ways of speaking
not only in the consulting room, but to children,
bosses, employees, friends and lovers. We do not
merely have ‘confessional’ styles, but a whole range
of other ways of putting the truth of the self into
discourse, making it hearable, seeable, inscribable,
hence manageable, manipulable. And we have a
proliferation of sites within which human beings
are required to reflect upon themselves in
psychological terms and render this into speech,
from the doctor’s surgery to the radio interview.

18. Techniques of evaluating the self, diagnosing its ills,
calibrating its failings and its advances in terms of the
norms of the intellect or the personality propagated by
psychology, the repertoires of feelings and emotions
disseminated by the therapies, the forms or normality
certified by the proponents of cognitive and
behavioural systems.

19. Techniques of reforming the self : the purgative effects of
speaking out, the liberating effect of understanding, the
restructuring effect of interpretation, the little practices for
the re-training of thoughts and emotions, the techniques
one should adopt to raise self-confidence and to maximise
self-esteem. Of particular importance is new methods for
the therapeutics of behaviour and cognition, versatile
micro-procedures which can be taught by a variety of
professionals and utilised by individuals in order to reshape
their psychological self to ‘take control of their lives’ within
an ethics of ‘empowerment’.

20. It seems to me that children's services, particularly
statutory based, regulate, normalize and control parental-
child relations. "Childhood is not a natural condition. That
is to say, children, childhood, play and development are
discursive phenomena that lack a natural, unmediated
nature." Current child care research on child development,
children's play, affective relations and attachment is seen in
terms of a matrix of cultural practices and pre-occupations.
It is shown that children's services functions – in
conjunction with the promises of neurologists,
paediatricians and developmental psychologists – as a form
of ‘ritual magic’ (Nelson-Rowe, 1994)

21. Children who present "challenging behaviour", "attachment disorders"
or "act out" are made into idealized entrepreneurial subjects. Simple
behavioural standards (e.g. ‘sits alone’ and ‘plays with simple objects’)
are set and disposition factors (e.g. ‘irritability’, ‘highly nervous’ and
‘mental balanced’) evaluated. A premium is placed on educational toys
used in family centres, play groups and nurseries, and which parents
are encouraged to buy for their children. Rattles and mobiles are things
of the past, with electronic toys now starting to dominate retail sales.
Geniusbabies.com offers such great online specials as Baby Mozart,
Baby Einstein and Baby Bach compact discs as well as ‘Baby Bright
Starts Gift Set’. A toddler magazine called Baby Talk ran an article ‘Why
you should choose your baby’s toys as carefully as you choose your
baby’s food’ (February 13th, 1994).

22. Despite of research to the contrary, (Bruer, 1997) the
implicit message promoted in children's services is that
very early experiences alone produce lifetime potential.
Simultaneously, the discourse and practices of children's
services extend and legitimize the extension of
governmentality over lower income populations, which are
perceived as threatening social and state security.
Accordingly, child care discourse affirms middle-class
values/lifestyles by invoking cultural practices and
preferences of the ‘ideal’ enriched environment and for
‘stimulating’ development. It also functions, inadvertently,
to problematize families by capitalizing on the middle-
class’s ‘fear of falling’.

23. Stephen A. Webb
Glasgow Caledonian University
Scotland