How the group home works: Everyday knowledge and authority in a community -based services setting.
Item
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Title
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How the group home works: Everyday knowledge and authority in a community -based services setting.
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Identifier
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AAI3083679
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identifier
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3083679
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Creator
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Levinson, Jack E.
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Contributor
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Adviser: David Goode
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, Public and Social Welfare | Sociology, Theory and Methods | Social Work
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Abstract
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This dissertation is a study of the everyday practice of freedom and authority based on more than a year of participant-observation in a group home for adults with cognitive disability (mental retardation). Group homes emerged in the 1970s as the alternative to custodial institutions, ideally to provide services to individuals with disability not as inmates, but as citizens with rights. For this reason, the research site is not approached in the familiar way as a setting of social control, but as an emblematic, if unnoticed, example of the fundamental tension in liberal societies between authority and individual freedom. The dissertation draws on sociological traditions that treat organizational participation and commitment as a dilemma of liberal freedom rather than simply a problem of power and control. The focus of the study is how the inherent, ongoing tension between authority and freedom is managed in the group home through the government of residents. Government refers to the systematic attempt to shape the kinds of conduct that enable individuals to govern themselves, including individuals whose capacities for freedom are always potentially in question.;Given the continuous and skillful activity this involves, the self-government of residents is treated as a kind of work, and the group home as a workplace in different ways. Michael Lipsky's concept of "street-level bureaucracy" is used to understand the organizational features that shape counselor work. The work residents do to "become more independent" is understood in terms of Nikolas Rose's analysis of the role psychological knowledge plays in contemporary practices of government. The competent participation of residents involves the endless clinical work they must do on themselves. Everyday life itself is approached as a third kind of work, an ethnomethodological notion with particular significance in this project for the study of cognitive disability. Authority and knowledge are observed in the everyday work that organizes the group home as a site of governmentality: staff meeting discussions, the role of records and written documents, individual clinical plans, and the know-how of residents and counselors. By showing how the group home works, the dissertation provides a new conception of the group home as it reflects broader ethical practices, and suggests, finally, that the work residents do to become more independent is not so very different from the way many individuals in contemporary society govern themselves.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
