Reimagining the Human Service Relationship - by Jaber Gubrium & Tone Andreassen & Per Solvang (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book helps professionals find new ways to foster trust and collaboration. Rethinking providing and receiving services in child welfare, addiction treatment, mental health, doctoring, palliative care, and more, it proves through everyday examples that these goals cannot be met without quality, interpersonal interaction.

Book Synopsis

The traditional lines of demarcation between service providers and service users are shifting. Professionals in managed service organizations are working to incorporate the voices of service users into their missions and the way they function, and service users, with growing access to knowledge, have taken on the semblances of professional expertise. Additionally, the human services environment has been transformed by administrative imperatives. The drive toward greater efficiency and accountability has weakened the bond between users and providers.

Reimagining the Human Service Relationship is informed by the premise that the helping relationship should be seen as developing in the interactive space between those who provide human services and those who receive them. The contributors to this volume redefine the contours, roles, institutional divisions, means, and aims of providing and receiving services in a range of settings, including child welfare, addiction treatment, social enterprise, doctoring, mental health, and palliative care. Though they advocate an experience-near approach, they remain sensitive to the ambiguities and competing rationalities of the service relationship. Taken together, these chapters reimagine the service relationship by making visible the working relevancies of service delivery.

Review Quotes

An excellent book that carefully looks into important aspects of the present-day relationship between
service providers and service users.

-- "Biz India"

Reimagining the Human Service Relationship is a positive note in the current human service environment of austerity, cut backs and top-down control of local care. Each chapter includes some imaginative possibilities for invigorating the care relationship. Taken as a whole, it is a well-balanced read that questions traditional assumptions about human service relationships as well as proposing strategies and describing programs in which transformation is already taking place.-- "Contemporary Sociology"

Reimagining the Human Service Relationship exemplifies a too-rare collaboration across ideas and substance, and between those working mainly in North America, Nordic countries, and the United Kingdom. From Jaber F. Gubrium's lucid and provoking opener, the contributors to this carefully integrated text draw in the reader.--Ian Shaw, University of York and University of Aalborg

An insightful collection of essays that illuminate the everyday dynamism of human service provision and the futility of adequately capturing this with experience-distant distinctions such as professional/client and autonomy/dependency. A must-read for students, scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and anyone else hoping to grasp the working realities of the service relationship.--Darin Weinberg, University of Cambridge

Speak to anyone on the receiving end of 'helping services' and they will say it is the relationship between practitioner and service user that is everything. However important it is, relationship-based practice has not been served well by modern managerialism and bureaucratization. What is important about this book is its focus on that relationship. Reimagining the Human Service Relationship explores how it may help and the new forms it may take with user involvement and service users as practitioners, and offers fresh insights to support its flowering in the future.--Peter Beresford, Brunel University London

The editors have succeeded in bringing together a group of international scholars to address a pressing issue encountered across human service provision, namely, how to conceptualize a meaningful service relationship that has validity at this historical moment. Drawing on research that questions the very existence of the divide between users and providers, Reimagining the Human Service Relationship offers thought-provoking insights that challenge both policy and practice.--Sheila Neysmith, University of Toronto

About the Author

Jaber F. Gubrium is professor of sociology at the University of Missouri. His most recent books are Turning Troubles into Problems: Clientization in Human Services (2014) and The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research (2012).

Tone Alm Andreassen is professor and head of research for the interdisciplinary program in care, health, and welfare at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences.

Per Koren Solvang is professor of rehabilitation at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences.