Joined-up Working, Welfare Professionalism and the Pursuit of the 'Pure Relationship' - A Critical Encounter With the Sociology of Trust

Abstract

The importance of inter-personal trust is a recurring yet unexplicated theme in research literature on 'joined-up working'. This paper uses Beck and Giddens' work on modernity, trust and 'pure relationships' to explicate why and how individualized trust relationships were axiomatic to the conduct of joint work between housing, probation and social workers in two recent ethnographic studies. In doing so, I develop a 'grounded theoretical' critique of Giddens thesis, which conflates 'active trust' building with the pursuit of openness in 'pure relationships'. My argument is that housing officers needed to trust individual probation and social workers, but sought to reduce their reliance on trust by building pure relationships with them, based on the principle of 'open practice'. This was because open practice enabled the housing officers to evaluate the risks, consequences etc of working with probation and social workers. Nevertheless, I show that housing officers' pursuit of pure relationships did not reduce the significance of their trust relationship with individual probation and social workers. This was because trust functioned to counterbalance the 'radical doubt' that housing officers had in probation and social workers, as a result of conducting these evaluations. This enables me to conclude that it is too simplistic to conceptualize 'trust' as the defining characteristic of late modernity. The paper is intended as a housing research contribution to the growing sociological literature on trust.