Travelling meanings: accountability practices and standardised instruments at a child protection service in the Netherlands

Jetske C. Erisman*, Jeanine S.M. van Veelen, Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, Barbara J. Regeer

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

In social work across Europe, the formalisation of daily practices through online instruments, systems and protocols, when interlinked with performance targets, often causes friction with the complex reality of practice. A child protection service in the Netherlands aims to ease this friction by reworking their online instruments to prioritise the needs of families and professionals. Their revised instruments have multiple purposes: (a) helping families; (b) encouraging professional reflection; (c) creating outputs that allow for organisational evaluation practices. In this qualitative study, we seek to understand how professionals interact with these revised instruments, and how professionals anticipate the travelling meanings of the collected data as they are used beyond the family-professional interaction in accountability and evaluation structures. We found that professionals must account for various audiences, temporalities of paperwork and uphold their authority while working with the instruments. We argue that to ensure that the instruments become meaningful in practice, despite their travelling meanings, child protection service professionals engage in boundary work: navigating tensions between simultaneous calls for transparency, accountability, and efficiency on one hand, and reflecting and caring on the other.

Original languageEnglish
Number of pages13
JournalEuropean Journal of Social Work
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 9 Dec 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

  • accountability
  • bureaucracy
  • Child protection
  • standardisation

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