The "User" Friend, Foe or Fetish Dr Stephen Cowden and Dr Gurnam Singh, Coventry University

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The "User"Friend, Foe or Fetish?Dr Stephen
Cowden and Dr Gurnam Singh,Coventry University

• 7th UK Joint Social Work Education Conference
  Making Connections new learning partnerships
  that challenge barriers to inclusion,
  Loughborough University, 6th to 8th July 2005

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The Key Issue

• I am personally suspicious of a monolithic
  approach to user involvement we need to
  consider user involvement more carefully and
  critically. We need to consider how and why it is
  undertaken. We need to consider both the
  progressive and regressive potential of such user
  involvement. (Beresford para 11 2003)

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Power ChoiceEmpowerment More Choice

• a fundamental shift needs to take place in the
  delivery of services to shift power toward
  service-users service users need more power
  and that of course means more choice (Smith
  2002)

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Getting things done!
Down with Ideology!
Long Live Evidence Based Practice!
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Historical Context

• Post-war welfare settlement
• New Social Movements
• Communities of resistance
• Restructuring of the Welfare State
• New Right 1970s and 1980s neo liberalism
• New Labour 1990s present New Managerialism
  and the Third-way

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Community Care or Care in the Community

• for the lefthas been grasped as vehicle for
  user empowerment and the demystification of
  professionalism. For the right it has been
  seized upon as an opportunity for low-cost
  solutions to social problems through utilising
  caring networks (Levick 1992 79).
• This easy transition in rhetoric from
  cost-cutting to improving the quality of life is
  made possible by the chameleon nature of some of
  the core concepts underpinning the policy.
  Independence can be construed as better for
  peoples self-esteem and respect its other
  advantage is that it costs less to have people
  doing things for themselves. Normalisation
  requires peoples integration into ordinary
  living networks it is also convenient that that
  promoting and prioritising informal caring
  networks produces less reliance on statutory
  servicesIt is thus not difficult to see how
  community care came to be construed as both the
  best and the cheapest, although it also apparent
  that the consensus hides deep ideological
  conflicts (Braye and Preston-Shoot 1995 12).

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What is User Involvement?

• This lack of clear guidelines on user involvement
  has been seen as allowing professional opinions
  on involvement to dominate. One problem is
  trying to agree what is up for debate when one
  talks of user involvement. Is it simply about
  involving users as 'consumers' in their
  treatment, or in planning or evaluating services?
  Or is it something more than that? Is there a
  real transfer of power to the service user? Does
  it include them running services themselves?
  (Simon Heyes, 1993xx)

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Ideological Positioning of the User
User

• User as expert/consultant
• Professional User
• Rubber Stamping
• Legitimating of managerialism
• As the other
• The subaltern
• The oppressed

X
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Good and Bad Users

• Policy refocused from individual rights to the
  activities, qualities and obligations of members
• One creates a kind of deserving and undeserving
  citizen/user
• Social inclusion policies point to one thing, how
  can the state facilitate, mobilise unemployed
  welfare claimants to be 'good citizens' and to
  participation in the economy. (Jordan 1999)

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Conclusion the way forward

• User involvement, however convenient in a culture
  of checklists and performance measures, must be
  seen as a means not an end in itself. It must not
  only be a vehicle for social inclusion, but most
  critically, in the longer term, a means by which
  new insights into power and powerlessness can be
  gained and new emancipatory polices constructed.