Keep the case going on – rationalities of and in transition

Influenced by on the one hand the governmentality studies in social work/social pedagogy and on the other hand by neo-institutional and power sensitive approaches in organizational research, in the last decade, research on institutional rationalities has become of eminent interest in social work re- search. The heuristic concept of ”rationality” aims at an analysis of practices and rules, that construct a difference between the legitimate and the illegitimate. It focuses on the reconstruction of knowl- edge. Organizations of public welfare production have to legitimate their practices, interventions and affordances thus referring to institutions as sets of legitimate ways to do things.
My paper is based on the result of a recently finished empirical research project situated in the field of young people’s transitions to work.
This study about talk-in-interaction in German Job Centers (project funded by the German Research Foundation, 2008–2011; University of Hildesheim) is based on a data corpus that consists of 52 transcripts of talks between professionals and clients/customers and additional 15 interviews with the personal advisors. The clients were all under 25 years old and receiving financial help. There backgrounds are very diverse, concerning their formal education degrees, their living situations, and some of them were still in the school system. We analyzed the transcripts of talk with conversation analyses and membership categorization analyses.
The project team has reconstructed a rationality pattern that is oriented to the question how a case can be processed in the existing help schemes and institutional frames, and how a working consen- sus can be kept despite potential conflicts in interaction.
Starting from these results, in my paper, I will go a step further and ask, what is the unsaid and the invisible in this pattern of rationality, and with which consequences.