TY - JOUR
AU - Jeyasingham,, Dharman
AB - Abstract Agile working (flexibility around practitioners’ roles and the location and time of work) is increasingly common across local authority social work in the UK but there is little evidence about the practices it entails, with the small amount of existing research concerned largely with its impact on office environments. This article presents findings from a qualitative exploratory study of eleven social workers’ practices and experiences when engaged in agile working away from office spaces. Data were generated through practitioner diaries, photographs elicited from practitioners and semi-structured interviews, and were analysed using a grounded theory approach. The study found practitioners engaged in agile working in a wide range of domestic, leisure and formal work environments across the public–private continuum. This gave them superficial control over how they worked, in particular the freedom to work in solitude and establish distance between themselves and perceived demands from service users and other practitioners. However, agile working also involved a wider range of material practices and affective experiences for practitioners. These changes provoke questions about data security, increased visibility and unanticipated encounters in public spaces, and the shifting relationship between information-management work and elements of practice involving face-to-face interaction with others. Child safeguarding, professional practice, children and families, social work and IT, qualitative methods Introduction Agile working has been defined as the flexibility of workers’ roles and the location and time of work, enabled by digital technology, in order to meet service demands more effectively and cheaply (Cannon, 2017). It is increasingly common in local authority social work in the UK but has so far been subject to little research. This article presents findings from a study of children’s safeguarding social workers’ practices and experiences when engaged in agile working away from office spaces. These show practitioners frequently working in solitude, engaged in disparate material practices and affective experiences across a range of public and private spaces. The article explores questions raised by the shift to agile working in relation to data security, shifting boundaries between work, public and private spaces, and changes to the experience, form and significance of information-management work. Agility and wider shifts in work The ‘agility’ literature tells us agile organisations are responsive to users’ requirements and able to adapt quickly in turbulent environments (Rigby et al., 2016). They use simple processes and flexible networks, and they promote open communication, collaboration, creativity and trust (Glinska, 2015; Denning, 2016,, 2017). They also usually entail ‘workforce agility’—conditions and practices that maximise responsiveness to changing demands for services—such as the use of self-employed workers and agile working practices. Discussions about organisational agility emerged in the early 2000s, in response to longer-term changes to business environments connected to globalisation and the expansion of online environments, and influenced by principles first developed in manufacturing and software development (see Kidd, 2000; Beck et al., 2001). Engagements with agility in the British public sector began soon after this (e.g. Allen et al., 2004) but only escalated with the instigation of the government’s fiscal austerity programme in 2010. Since then, cash-strapped local authorities have adopted agile approaches increasingly enthusiastically, in order to improve efficiency and narrow the extent of their responsibilities (e.g. by shifting staff from local-authority-owned to leased office buildings). This is evident in the now widespread discourse of digital transformation in the public sector and those organisations with which it contracts (e.g. CIPD, 2014; PwC, 2017). At the same time, discussions about flexible working have shifted from a discourse of work–life balance and more equitable working arrangements for employees, to reduction of overheads and greater responsiveness (Lewis et al., 2017). Agile working is one element of wider changes relating to where work is done, how it is experienced and the social relations involved. Technological developments and the financialisation of many Western economies have led to working roles and conditions that are subject to near constant change, resulting in greater opportunities for some but more insecure, poorly paid employment for many others. It has been argued that the rise in virtual workspaces, more informal work cultures and a discourse of more humane, egalitarian work relations has also, paradoxically, led to greater individual responsibility, isolation and stress in work (Ross, 2003; Turkle, 2011). At the same time, these changes have facilitated greater use of out-sourcing and remote working, enabling a wider range of work to occur in traditionally non-work locations such as people’s homes and leisure spaces. This has reduced some previous barriers to work but also enabled lower-paid, more insecure work and increasing expectations that caring and domestic labour occur alongside paid work, with particular implications for some groups of women (Adkins and Dever, 2016). Together, these changes have produced greater insecurity, but also enabled a wider range of affective experiences of work, with some of the most insecure, risk-filled and low-paid forms of labour described by workers as creative, enjoyable, even playful (McRobbie, 2004; Malin and Chandler, 2017). Social work discussions about agile working So far, the debate about agile working in social work has focused on changes to social workers’ office environments and identified some of the above issues, such as isolation and increased stress, as agile working’s consequences. Numerous features in the British social work press have highlighted the impacts of large, open-plan offices and hot-desking on social workers’ ability to concentrate, interact with colleagues and reflect on their practice (e.g. Stevenson and McNicoll, 2016). The articles about agile working in academic journals to date, including my earlier research, have been concerned with practitioners’ views about changes in either office spaces or interview facilities in practitioners’ workplaces (Jeyasingham, 2016; McDermott, 2016). Literature focusing on other aspects of contemporary practice has also noted the impact of agile working on time spent in offices and the consequent effects on team identity, relationships between colleagues and workplace stress (e.g. Biggart et al., 2016; Horwath, 2016). While these are all important concerns, research has not yet explored agile working beyond offices: where social workers do the work they previously did in offices, when this happens, the material practices, affective experiences and wider social relations involved. These matters are likely to be highly significant for the quality and impact of social work practice. Research focus and methods The study was grounded in an epistemological frame of material culture studies (Vannini, 2009). This encompasses attention to the material qualities of objects, how these come into being through social and material processes and how they affect people and other things as they interact with them and so exert their own agency. It also raises questions about their cultural resonances, how objects are experienced and how they come to have particular meanings and practical roles in particular social contexts. These concerns were seen as important for this study because of the central significance of material environments and objects for how agile working is practised and experienced. For example, the sensations (feelings, noises, tastes) and material effects of working on a laptop in a cafe are likely to be different from desk-based work in an office. Some of these questions have been asked, particularly in relation to interactions between practitioners and ‘big things’ such as office spaces (Rose et al., 2010; Jeyasingham, 2016), but agile working involves a range of more and less novel interactions between smaller objects and people, such as between social workers and the various combinations of virtual and paper records they produce and engage with in their work away from the office (a matter with significant legal consequences; see suesspiciousminds.com, 2018). The study sought to answer the following questions: In what spaces and at what times do social workers engage in agile working? What materials, objects and devices are involved in agile working? What are practitioners’ experiences of working in these ways? What are practitioners’ views about the effects of agile working on their practice? The study focused on those elements of practice that previously occurred more often in office spaces, which agile working enabled practitioners to do elsewhere. These included: reading and writing records and reports; using information systems and work e-mail; informal supervision; informal meetings with other practitioners; communicating via phone or text with families and practitioners; planning or reflecting on work; thinking deeply about or analysing case information. In addition, the study explored uses of electronic devices (desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones) and information systems during work more generally, including office-based work and interactions with families. The research was conducted in a children’s safeguarding team in a metropolitan borough that covered a mixed urban/rural area. This team was chosen because it was viewed within the authority as working well and was part of a children’s social care service that was well evaluated and had a responsive, effective leadership. Agile practices were already established, in that there was flexibility about when and where social workers worked, they were equipped with laptops for use away from the office and arrangements for secure remote access to the information system and work e-mail were in place. The team was based in an office room used by around forty people from three children’s social care teams, which provided practitioners with desks of their own. This was in a 1970s office building, that was spacious but required some modernisation in relation to access, ventilation and other matters. There had been plans to move to another office with shared workstations but, because of concerns raised by staff, this move had been cancelled. The research site therefore offered an opportunity to explore agile working in a relatively well-functioning working environment, outside of the context of hot-desking and large, shared office spaces with which it is usually associated. All of the nine social workers in the team participated in the study, along with the team manager and assistant team manager (included because of their own experiences and insights into social workers’ practice), one family support worker and one business support worker (included in order to identify issues for these occupational groups). The study used an ethnographic approach. This involved observation, brief conversations with participants and photographs taken by the researcher in the office space, alongside research diaries and photographs taken by participants relating to their work in various places, and semi-structured interviews to discuss these data. It was not possible to gain approval for observations of participants outside the office, either practice with service users or in the variety of other places where social workers were engaged in agile work. Of the thirteen participants, all the social workers, the assistant team manager and the family support worker engaged in agile working, so these participants (eleven in total) were asked to keep research diaries for a week, including their own photographs of where they worked and recording each work activity, its time and location, equipment used, thoughts about their experience of doing this work and other activities they did at the same time. After diaries were completed, participants engaged in semi-structured interviews, talking through their diaries, photos, and experiences and views of agile work more generally. A grounded theory approach to data analysis and the development of concepts was used. The diaries, interview transcripts, field notes and photos were manually coded in order to identify recurring themes, with particular attention to the material qualities of practice and how these were represented. This analysis paid attention to the particular forms of data generated in the study. Photographs, for example, were analysed in terms of their focus, content, juxtaposition of elements and styles of representation, before being discussed with participants and their explanations recorded in the interviews. Analysis proceeded through constant comparison, with themes and concepts being identified as data were being generated, and this led to certain concepts, for instance relating to the significance of autonomy and pleasure in work beyond the office, becoming a greater focus of later interviews. Ethical approval for the study was granted from the University of Manchester Research Ethics Committee and all participants gave written consent to take part in the study. Findings The following section presents data that show the diverse spaces, practices and affective experiences involved in agile work. They suggest the significance of solitude and separation for information-management work, and the experience of such work as an intense individual interaction with records, usually through electronic devices. No significant differences were identified between participants relating to social location or working role and so details about such matters are not generally included. However, participants are given numbers (P1–P11) to enable readers to identify findings that relate to the same participant. Working at home Home was the most common location for agile work, and most participants worked at home for the entire day on occasions. The most common reason for doing so was to work on court statements, and those participants who had active legal proceedings described working at home one or more days a week. Participants all valued the solitude and material comfort of such work, and the ability to moderate noise and material surroundings according to the needs of the task in hand, in contrast to what they described as the ‘distractions’ and ‘disruption’ of the office. Working at home facilitated a longer working day. This, along with the absence of interruptions from colleagues and phone calls (most participants described switching off mobile phones), produced a slower pace—‘You feel like you’ve got all the time in the world’ (P1)—and enabled participants to immerse themselves in their work. This was also possible because home working enabled practitioners to organise their work differently in space. They often logged off from the information system and worked from paper records, which could be spread out and moved around. For example, P1 described having ‘hard copies’ of reports and records ‘all over the floor … all over the sofa, so I can literally just pick them up and just take … what bit I need’. Similarly, P2 described working in a completely different way [at home]. I have everything set out into little piles, and I can just put as much mess as I want really, and have it in my own order in my head, the way things are. It looks more chaotic but it’s chaos that I understand. Most participants also described working at home outside standard working hours, straight after getting home or later in the evening/night. It was often urgent work, either records of work done during the day, made in case duty social workers became involved, or time-sensitive reports such as for child protection conferences. Participants also described doing non-urgent recording work, which there was usually no time to do during the day. Working at home in the evening involved a wider range of experiences than during the day. Sometimes it was described in terms of flexibility and convenience, such as going home early and recording the day’s work there, or being able to do unexpected urgent recording work alongside childcare, rather than staying late at the office. It was also sometimes described as a personal, even intimate, activity: I have like a little desk in my bedroom and I’ve made it into a little kind of cosy area, you know. So it’s just easier, so when I put the baby to bed I can just do whatever I need to do and then go to bed (P3). Logging on to the information system outside of work hours was sometimes described as positive—a way of managing anxiety about work (P5, P6), ‘tempting’ (P7) or something to do ‘if you just feel in the mood’ (P3). It had the effect of moderating the pace and stress of work while also, of course, extending practitioners’ working day and increasing the flow of work into non-work times and spaces. However, such work was also often experienced as distracted and exhausting, particularly at night. P4 spoke of having to finish a child protection investigation report and read emails she had not had time to look at during the day: I started working at eight. I think it was just after ten I finished. It’s nice working at home but at that time of night you’re tired, you are tired. You’ve done a full day and I was doing that whilst I was watching TV and eating. Adkins and Dever (2016) note how deep affective experiences of work enable many women to continue to endure—even be attached to—exhausting, unsustainable work. In this study, participants’ accounts of home working also demonstrated how personal connections with work and affective experiences that were often intense (both positive and negative) gave meaning to home working, enabling social workers to take pleasure and find value in aspects of their work and continue to do it. They provided examples of deep, often personal, engagement in analysing and constructing written reports, and suggested a shift towards this kind of work being understood as solitary and distant from their work when alongside colleagues. Working in public spaces Seven participants described engaging in agile work in public spaces, usually cafes or cars. Two themes emerged from these accounts: the significance of atmosphere for enabling smooth, efficient work in public spaces, and the challenges of maintaining privacy and confidentiality. Work in cafes Four of the nine social workers described regularly writing records or reports in cafes, two others stated they might work in such places and two participants expressed concerns about the data-security implications of doing so. Cafes were a feature of other aspects of social workers’ working routines as well as agile work—for example, team meetings had recently started to be held in a private room in a nearby branch of Starbucks, to get practitioners away from the potential distractions of the office and improve participation. Working in cafes was therefore an aspect of practice that was both subject to disagreement and common enough to be unremarkable. Practitioners used cafes as bases for agile work because they provided somewhere to spend time between nearby visits or meetings, rather than having to travel to and from the office, but they also worked in cafes because they preferred them as workspaces, at least some of the time. They offered comfort, pleasures and some buffering of social status, unlike the stigmatised spaces social workers occupied at other times. P8 explained her reason for working in a cafe on a recent occasion: P8: I just thought ‘Oh, where can I go now for the next hour, rather than sat in my car?’ So I just went there and typed—well, I updated a load of child protection plans while I was there, which was handy. Interviewer: And did you have anything to drink or eat? P8: I did, it was a hot day and I had an iced green tea. And it was handy because I could plug my laptop in and they had wi-fi as well, so it was a lot easier than just sat in my car. As well as child protection plans, participants described accessing the information system, writing case notes and drafting core group minutes in cafes. These were seen as suitable tasks for such spaces, which had similar levels of background noise and movement to the office but offered atmospheres and forms of sociality that were more conducive to sustained, enjoyable work. P9 spoke of working in Costa prior to meetings because it was a ‘nice place to be … somewhere I felt comfortable that I could sit and do what I needed to do’. Chain cafes were particularly favoured by participants: as P6 said, she would work in ‘Costa, Starbucks, probably more slightly one of them, because … everyone wants to chat to you in little cafes’. Chain cafes provided superficial conviviality alongside civil inattention and subjective privacy (see Jones et al., 2015), in contrast to the interruptions and distractions of the office. Working in cafes entails potential proximity with unknown others and, while participants each spoke about how they adapted their working practices to manage this, they did not come to the same conclusions about what was needed. There were different views about whether it was safe to access the information system via cafe Wi-Fi connections. Participants described using different strategies for maintaining confidentiality while using laptops—sitting in empty areas or with a wall behind them, tilting the screen downwards while they typed—each of which could still conceivably allow others to see confidential records. No participants said that they would make work phone calls in a cafe, but some said they might accept such calls and manage them once they began. As well as risks to data security, cafe spaces carry the potential for unanticipated encounters. Certain participants were conscious of this and chose not to work in them, such as P10: The Starbucks is, it’s like on the edge of the big estate where we work, so I just think, I don’t feel it would be really appropriate for me to go and log on in there. Because families do go in. And I know they’re not going to come and look, but I just don’t feel comfortable about that. However, others seemed not to have considered this, suggesting they viewed cafes as separate from their interactions with families—spaces where they could work in anonymity rather than spaces of potential encounter. P8 worked in the same branch of Starbucks and this was her response to a question about what she would do if a member of a family she had worked with came in: It’s not really something I’ve thought of because I haven’t ever found myself in that situation, but I think if it was a family, I would just maybe say hello and maybe pack up, give it five minutes and then maybe pack up and move on, I don’t think I’d want to just as soon as I saw them pack up and leave, but I wouldn’t really want to be sat doing any work with them around. Alongside the examples of home working in the previous section, these accounts demonstrate the significance of pleasurable experience, a more informal feel and autonomy over superficial elements of work for endowing such work with value. Working in cars Four practitioners worked in their cars during periods between visits or meetings, rather than returning to the office. They valued the separation from office distractions that was possible in the car. P5 described her experiences of car-based working: To be honest, I don’t mind it, because I think it’s a bit of reflection. I quite like that time. It’s unlikely anyone’s going to ring me. It’s quiet and it’s just kind of time for me, where I can think about stuff like … the atmosphere of a meeting, how things were. Like cafes, the car was preferable to the office because of its convenient location and its separation from potential sources of interruption but, in examples like this one, it also offered solitude and a quieter atmosphere, and her description echoed notions of the reflective potential of car spaces explored by Ferguson (2010). Working in cars was not always a peaceful or reflective experience, though. P1 frequently used the time between visits to make work phone calls while parked in supermarket car parks. She described this kind of work: Obviously, it’s hot and stuffy, depending on the day. It can be quite uncomfortable, especially because every time I get in and I know I’m going to work from my car, my seat goes all the way back, so I’ve got plenty of leg room. My other chair’s full of either my diary or my [note]books or mobile phone or anything I need information from, and you’re literally—I’m sitting on the side, probably have my knee over the gear stick, you know what I mean? Just to get that bit comfy. Other instances of car-based work could feel peaceful and private but still entail the opportunities for unanticipated encounters that occurred in more evidently public spaces. P11 gave an example where, after visiting a service user and not getting an answer, she returned to her car nearby and made some phone calls. She then recognised a man leaving the house who was subject to a non-molestation order relating to contact with the service user. In fact, this social worker had not seen the man before but had found his photo by searching the service user’s friends on Facebook. She reported the incident to the police. As with home and cafe working, work in cars entailed a wide variety of different affects, atmospheres and practices. Although participants were often unconcerned with their immediate surroundings, working in cars involved social workers occupying public spaces and this produced the potential for exposure, intrusion and unplanned surveillance. The emerging evidence about social workers viewing service users’ Facebook pages suggests there are similarly wide-ranging views about the acceptability of intrusions into the virtual spaces of service users’ lives (Sage et al., 2017). Two broad themes can be identified in participants’ accounts of agile work in public and leisure spaces. One concerns the importance of pleasant atmospheres and arrangements that promote smooth, continuous working. Cafes were valued for their atmospheres of superficial conviviality, they were seen as more desirable spaces than the office and they offered a chance to get on with work undisturbed in an environment enlivened by the activity of others. These changes in the affective experience of work suggest its reconfiguration both as an acceptable context for consumer pleasures and as a more adaptable, efficient and controlled process. Work can happen in many more places and times, such as the previously unusable gaps in diaries between appointments. Information-management work is also more contained and predetermined in that it is more often done alone, remote from the complicating effects of informal supervision or negotiation with families. Simultaneously, social workers are afforded superficial autonomy and subjectivity through consumption (Lazzarato, 1996). The other theme relates to the challenges of maintaining privacy in public or semi-public spaces. Participants understood that agile work presented challenges to data security but did not necessarily have effective strategies for meeting them. Other privacy issues—how to manage their visibility in public spaces and the potential for unplanned encounters, haphazard surveillance and intrusions on the privacy of others—were often treated as more straightforward than they actually were. This suggests agile working, despite its apparent potential for more community-based work, had not led to social workers engaging more consciously as community actors. Working on mobile devices Research in health care services has shown that the introduction of mobile electronic devices can have unexpected effects, such as compromises to patient privacy and increasing social media use by practitioners (Dexheimer and Borycki, 2015; Sergeeva et al., 2016). Nevertheless, health and social care practitioners in the UK are increasingly expected to use such devices to engage with service users, make assessments, record data and communicate with colleagues (The King’s Fund, 2016; NHS Digital, 2017). Participants in this study were using a model of convertible laptop/tablet with a range of functions—touchscreen, drawing capability, detachable keyboard, high-quality camera and microphone—that enabled different forms of interaction and data recording and was also highly portable. This versatility was the reason the machine was selected by management: it could enable recording and communication with other professionals while away from the office and promote more creative, adaptive communication between practitioners and family members, particularly children—a key priority under the current inspection regime. Despite their evident potential, no social workers were using these laptops to engage with children or their families at the time of the study. Those who talked about the devices’ suitability for such work tended to see them as potential barriers to communication. Participants spoke about how they could establish greater distance between practitioners and parents who could not afford expensive equipment themselves or leave people feeling they had no control over what was recorded about them. Some participants described using their laptops to make notes while with families, but others suggested this negatively affected interactions; for example, P9 said: I don’t know how children would react to me sitting there with a [laptop] and typing away while you’re having that visit, because, I think, I personally don’t like that. I think it’s more informal really, using a pen and paper just to jot down things to aid your memory, rather than sitting with a screen, which is a barrier really if you’re in somebody’s living room. I think it’s impersonal, to me it feels rude. Participants saw their laptops as offering flexibility, but primarily in terms of how practitioners themselves could interact with them, rather than how they could enable new interactions with other people. For almost all participants, agile working was work via mobile devices (either laptops or phones) and this was illustrated by the photos included in the research diaries, all of which featured laptops or phones centre-frame. Laptops enabled participants to do recording and report writing whenever and wherever required and, in so doing, they changed participants’ relationships with this aspect of their work. They led some to feel their work could be more closely informed by electronic records (e.g. when used in supervision). When most participants talked about using their laptops to work on reports and records away from the office, their accounts emphasised ease, comfort or intimacy and negative feelings were described only when the devices failed to work as smoothly as they should. These responses differed from the ways participants talked about their work on the information system in the office, which was discussed in either neutral or negative terms—for example, as laborious, pressured or subject to frequent interruptions. Distributed decision making The study provided examples of mobile devices, Wi-Fi connections and the information system being used by practitioners to share information with colleagues who were involved in contemporaneous work elsewhere. This meant practitioners were able to draw conclusions about what action to take without speaking together, in person or over the phone. The following example shows how this might work in practice. P6 described using a Wi-Fi-connected laptop during a child protection investigation that identified the need for emergency placements for several children in different locations. The concerns related to a physical injury and involved the social worker and family waiting at a hospital for several hours during the evening, to get a medical assessment of one of the children. Over the course of this time, the social worker phoned colleagues in the office to let them know where she was, but communicated information critical to the investigation via the information system, uploading records of her discussion with members of the family—‘more or less [doing] part of my initial assessment while sat there and … feeding that back to the office’. She preferred this to using the phone because she could provide confidential information without the family being aware: When you’re typing, you can turn your screen a bit, so they can’t see what’s going on, especially if you’ve got concerns potentially about the person you’re sat with […] I’m quite relaxed at times in my nature, so I’m a bit like, ‘I’m just going to bob stuff down now and then when I get back I haven’t got it all to do tonight’. Laptop-based work was therefore presented to service users as making notes rather than sharing information with other practitioners. Drawing conclusions about what protective action was needed involved piecing together information from spatially distant sources: [The father] had reported it, but we needed the age roughly of the bruising to see where—whose care this child had been in [when the injury occurred]. And then we were trying to come up with a timeframe really, because his story didn’t match the mother’s story of the timeframe, so it was how we started to unpick bits of that and that was bits that I didn’t do all of—some of that was done in the office. I just kept sending my bits of information over. The dynamics of exchanging information, forming judgements, making decisions and taking action in this account differ in certain respects from how such work would likely have been done prior to the availability of remote access to information system. Much larger quantities of information can be exchanged than would have been possible over the phone, but there is also a change in terms of how information is understood: as ‘bits of information’—a number of facts that can be gathered from spatially distributed sources and evaluated at a distance from individual social workers and service users. The work of gathering, sharing and making sense of information also becomes detached from the work of discussing with co-present service users the process and implications of social work involvement. Gathering and sharing information is therefore understood not just as quicker, but also as simpler, because it is untangled from people’s anxiety and potential resistance. Discussion This study provides detailed discussion about one research site, and the practices and experiences described here should not be taken as definitive of agile approaches elsewhere. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that cafe- and home-based working are features of practice elsewhere, and research has already identified the practice of reflective work in cars (Ferguson, 2010). So, it is plausible to suggest this paper’s findings and the shifts in practice they indicate have wider relevance. While most writing about agile working in social work has suggested practitioners do not enjoy it or feel it helps them to work well, this study provided evidence of much more complex experiences—frequently of pleasure, convenience and freedom, as well as instances of discomfort and concerns about increasing separation of practitioners from each other. Agile working was hard to dislike entirely; even the most sceptical participants who were engaged in agile work described their own experience of it as positive, though they might be concerned about its wider implications. These generally positive experiences should not be taken as an indication that agile working promotes open communication, adaptable networks of practitioners and practice that more effectively fulfils its core purposes—the claims often made in the agility literature (e.g. Allen et al., 2004). Agile working was usually valued because it was convenient and it increased participants’ control over superficial aspects of their work, such as where and when they could do recording and other information-management work. The availability of staff across a longer working day and acceptance that non-urgent work should be done outside of traditional working hours suggest the labour of social workers is increasingly embedded in their non-work lives. This makes it more informal, both in its feel and in terms of the reduction in employers’ responsibility for such work and for workers while they do it. It is also a more individual activity, in terms of both its subjectively felt uniqueness and its context within organisational relations: practitioners experience greater autonomy over the time and place of work, and this leads more work to be carried out by individuals separated from each other in time and space. In this study, the flexibility to work in different places and on the move, enabled by mobile devices and secure Wi-Fi, had not so far led to new, more effective ways of working with people, communities or other practitioners. The example of communication via the information system during a child protection investigation provides evidence of practitioners distributed across distant locations, sharing information and working more quickly. However, speed might not be the most important element of such work, particularly if it is associated with thinner relations between practitioners and people who use services. Broadhurst and Mason (2014, p. 584) have discussed how the reorientation of social work towards office-based work on screens might lead to a ‘flatness’ of affect in some social workers’ face-to-face communication with families, which, when discussing intimate matters, is incongruous and alienating. The current study identifies further, related dangers, where screens themselves are present and distract social workers or leave co-present family members excluded from social workers’ discussions with distant others. The study provided no evidence of social workers engaging in more community-oriented work, working in places that made them more accessible to families, using a wider range of communication strategies with children and their families or even just spending more time with them. It did provide examples of how agile working enabled practitioners to do information-management work in subtly different ways. Working at home, in cafes and in cars provided the opportunity to write records or make phone calls in pleasant environments or during brief interludes, via devices that facilitated easy information-management practices, changing practitioners’ relationship with this element of their work. However, while the affective experience of agile work was often smoother, sometimes richer than work in offices, and participants were often able to integrate work with domestic commitments or consumer pleasures, the social relations involved were usually more limited. The material arrangements of work at home, such as the availability of time and space to oneself and a living-room floor or kitchen table over which papers could be spread, were also means through which certain forms of agile working enabled new ways of thinking and engaging with information. These interactional forms point to the potential for more creative ways of working, but they also indicate a shift in social work towards understanding sense making as an intense interaction between practitioner and record, human and screen (Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger, 2002) rather than an activity occurring through informal supervision or discussion and reflection with colleagues (see e.g. Pithouse, 1998). The study raises a number of questions for further research. The shift towards more work being conducted remotely suggests qualitatively different forms of sense making, but this matter requires further research, based on observation of sense-making work and its contexts. The study provides examples of social workers using mobile electronic devices in new contexts including with families (though not, in this study, as a tool to enhance communication) and of social workers feeling at ease working via electronic devices in a range of different public and domestic spaces. The research diaries and interviews with social workers used in this study provide some insights into these matters but observation of social work practices away from the office would provide more evidence here. Discussions with service users about their views about such practices and about agile approaches more generally are also crucial. Finally, agile approaches are being implemented differently in different authorities and places within authorities, because of organisational cultures but also the requirements of local contexts (e.g. needing to work more remotely in many rural areas, limited use of cars by practitioners in some urban areas). Future research should identify such differences and evaluate distinct approaches. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the practitioners who gave up their time to take part in this study. Funding This study was funded by a grant from the Division of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, University of Manchester. Conflict of interest statement. None declared. References Adkins L. , Dever M. (eds) ( 2016 ) The Post-Fordist Sexual Contract: Working and Living in Contingency , Basingstoke , Palgrave Macmillan . Allen T. , Bell A. , Graham R. , Hardy B. , Swaffer F. 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TI - Seeking Solitude and Distance from Others: Children’s Social Workers’ Agile Working Practices and Experiences beyond the Office
JF - The British Journal of Social Work
DO - 10.1093/bjsw/bcy077
DA - 2019-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/seeking-solitude-and-distance-from-others-children-s-social-workers-NvcfGZXpKx
SP - 559
VL - 49
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -