Declientification: Undoing ClientIdentities in Care Planning Conferenceson the Termination of Residential Care

That social welfare clients ought to be looked at not as given, a priori entities, but rather as categories produced in accordance with the policies, resources and options of the institutions involved is established today as a common ground for reflexive and reconstructivist perspectives in social work research. The disestablishment of the client role, however, up to now seems to have met a blind spot. This article will present findings from a conversation analytical study based on fourteen fully transcribed care planning conferences in the context of German long-term residential childcare, concentrating on five meetings explicitly designed to terminate the service provision. We will show how long-term residential care is regularly terminated by a range of interactional strategies complementary to those of client production that can be flexibly exploited in response to institutional and political context requirements. Conversation analysis is introduced as a method that can unveil the interactive practices professionals use in order to balance the constraints of institutional social work against the needs of the individual cases.