The ‘service user’ label through critical constructivist lenses

Journal article

Cockain, Alex 2024. The ‘service user’ label through critical constructivist lenses. Critical and Radical Social Work. https://doi.org/10.1332/20498608Y2024D000000047
AuthorsCockain, Alex
AbstractMindful of the risk of seeming to cover ‘old ground’, this article strives to open new ground, or make old ground fresh again, by regarding the ‘service user’ label through critical constructivist lenses. Specifically, this article seeks to demonstrate how the agentive, self-determining qualities attached to ‘service users’, as opposed to ‘clients’ or ‘customers’, are complicated by more pejorative connotations ascribed to the term in everyday, social work and neoliberal discourses while highlighting how words matter. Not only do tensions between and within discourses register and generate tensions in practice, but, especially, language also constitutes social reality and the people and things making it up. Although frightening, yet inescapably ‘normal’, instances of structural violence and harsh austerity measures must be regarded in the context of discourse, albeit while not being determined by it, questioning common-sense discourses and the practices they index may produce possibilities for creating alternate languages and practices.
KeywordsConstructivism; Critical perspectives; De/re/construction; Service user; Structural violence
Year2024
JournalCritical and Radical Social Work
PublisherBristol University Press
ISSN2049-8608
2049-8675
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1332/20498608Y2024D000000047
Official URLhttps://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/crsw/aop/article-10.1332-20498608Y2024D000000047/article-10.1332-20498608Y2024D000000047.xml
Publication dates
Print19 Aug 2024
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Accepted24 Jul 2024
Deposited19 Aug 2024
Accepted author manuscript
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