Selective response to complaints

Social workers’ digital interactions with clients

Abstract

Digital, written interaction has become an extensive practice in modern society, also between citizens and public service providers. In NAV (the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration), interaction between counsellors and service users is increasingly taking place in written form on a digital platform. In this article, we study sequences of written interaction in which service users present complaints towards the counsellor or NAV. With a discourse analytical approach, we study how counsellors meet such complaints and the rhetorical resources they employ in their written responses. The analyses show that the responses are selective and that they acknowledge, avoid, or reject the complaints in an indirect manner, often without explicitly addressing the grievances presented in the complaint. Through rhetorical strategies such as conversationalisation, character work and shifts between personal, professional and institutional voices, the counsellors set boundaries for their involvement and place responsibility for future action on the service user. This can be seen as an expression of the conflicting perspectives of the participants, but also the challenges inherent in the digital format of counselling. There is a risk in such selective responses that topics that are important to the service users might escape attention and be backgrounded in a dialogue that also functions as documentation.