Constructing Agency in Welfare Encounters: Narratives of Autonomy, Integrity, Knowledge, and Responsibility in Encounters between People Who Use Drugs and Swedish Social Services

People who use drugs have increasingly come to be portrayed as rights-bearing subjects within European welfare discourse. With some delay, this is also the case in Sweden, where they have long been positioned as legitimate objects of societal control and interventions but are increasingly spoken of as active and knowledgeable service users. Rights-based discourses that emphasize clients’ autonomy, integrity, knowledge, and self-determination have gained rhetorical precedence in Western social work over authoritarian discourses that privilege professionals’ knowledge and control. At the same time, such discourses can be employed by welfare organizations to responsibilize and legitimize the shifting of responsibility for clients' welfare from professionals to the clients themselves. Moreover, clients' autonomy and self-determination are in practice always conditioned by welfare organizations' mandates, knowledge, resources, policies and prevailing legislation. However, there is relatively little research on how clients who use drugs perceive and handle their encounters with professionals in welfare organizations, particularly regarding autonomy, integrity, knowledge and responsibility. The focus of this paper is on how clients narratively construct their agency in the encounter with professionals within social service. The material, collected in an ongoing study, consists of transcribed interviews with people who use drugs and are in contact with social services, and is analyzed by employing narrative analysis methods and analytical concepts from discursive psychology. I analyze and discuss the values, ideals and dilemmas produced in clients’ narratives, as well as how these are presented to both orient and limit clients’ agency within their narrative constructions. Preliminary findings suggest that agency in clients’ narratives about their encounters with social services cannot be described in terms such as ‘restricted’ or ‘unrestricted’ but is constructed as framed by tensions and dilemmas related to dimensions such as autonomy, integrity, knowledge and responsibility.