Foucauldian theory suggests that power is present in those relations between clients and social workers that somehow aim to influence the conduct of the clients.
This theoretical proposition makes it possible to explore power as something productive in that it may reshape conduct. How is this exercise of power strategised in social work? To explore this question, we can turn to social work that addresses sex workers, who have been targeted by government intervention in the West since around the mid-1800s.
Empirical material from Denmark covers substantial parts of the country’s sex work policy, abstracted from three bureaucratic levels: the government, the municipalities and the exit programmes that target sex workers. In particular, it has considered how (a) government officials have formulated and defended the country’s sex work policy since 1998; (b) municipalities have strategised social work when applying for funding to perform exit programmes between 2020 and 2023; and (c) key stakeholders in these exit programmes strategised how to achieve the programmes’ official goals to improve the life of sex workers and offer them a way out of sex work.
From a Foucauldian perspective, Denmark is an interesting case. Selling and buying sex is not a criminal offence as long as third parties are not profiting from the trade. Provided they pay taxes, sex workers may freely offer their services on the streets, via escort agencies and from brothels without facing criminal sanctions. For social work, this means that its strategies must rely strongly on persuasion to recruit and transform sex workers. To put it in more Foucauldian terms, the social work strategies must facilitate a practice that produces subjects who voluntarily align with the objectives of power, that is, to decide to improve their lives and (potentially) leave sex work.
When analysing the empirical materials using Foucauldian theory on power as a lens, it becomes apparent that power must be viewed as a two-sided coin. On one side, the strategy relies on the application of certain instruments (technologies of power), such as outreach work, counselling, bridge-building and therapy to, on the other side, entice the targeted sex workers to devise their own personal strategies for self-care and self-knowledge (technologies of the self). Using these personal technologies, sex workers are expected to change their way of thinking about themselves, and therefore to transform their relationship to themselves (their subjectivities). To be more specific, the strategy appears to rely on the ability of the sex workers to ask themselves critical questions about (a) their ability to care for themselves while selling sex; (b) why they repeatedly risk their health and wellbeing by involving themselves in sex work; and (c) how they could reinvent their lives through self-care practices.
Based on this analysis, however, power exercise is not problematic in itself. Rather, this form of power exercise is an almost intrinsic part of our society from which we cannot easily detach ourselves. Nevertheless, the power exercised through the Danish exit programmes raises some concerns about sex workers who may have difficulties devising personal self-care strategies. What happens to those sex workers who wish to exit, but cannot devise the expected self-care strategies? In this context, it is important to point out that social work strategies must find ways of helping all types of clients out of risky and harmful social conditions, regardless of their personal capacities.
The research suggests that power may be operated to produce clients who change their conduct based on a transformation of their relationship to themselves. From a Foucauldian perspective, social work subsequently appears as a technology to transform problematic subjectivities by encouraging the identified individuals to devise a functioning set of technologies of the self to better comply with common norms and expectations of a healthy and productive life. Although the possibility of applying these results to other political contexts can be questioned, many social work programmes are perhaps underpinned by the conceptual logic that so-called ’social problems’ are about people who are perceived to lack the sufficient technologies of the self to enable them to govern themselves successfully. Are ‘social problems’ in our context about people who are perceived to lack technologies of the self, and is social work practice about enticing people to devise these technologies?
Henrik Karlsson is a PhD student at Uppsala University, Department for Social Work.
Turning sex workers into self-caring persons: relying on technologies of the self in social work practice by Henrik Karlsson is available to read open access on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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