Relationality and scaling-sensitivity in action: About persons as 'clients' of 'human services'

This contribution relates the authors’ experiences of applying a relational and scaling-sensitive approach to human service clients within the framework of a research training project with bachelor degree students in social work. By conceiving persons as relational (and not self-actional or interactional entities) and hypothesising that persons-in-relation-at-places-in-time cut the ‘world’ into scales of various ideational, emotional and material dimensionality, the basic question consisted of how persons as clients relate to and scale persons as professionals and members of so-called social services, and thereby continuously reinvent and covenante social reality.

On the one hand, the presentation will put to discussion the pursued methodological movement by giving direct insight into the analytical process of transcribing, relationing and comparing. On the other hand, we will discuss the ‘merits’ of such a movement, especially with regard to questions of equivocity, ambiguity, hybridity or, as we would put it, fractality of social reality. Indeed, persons and places (or any other thinglike entity) take on a holographic stance depending on the relationalities.