Introduction

In social welfare, holding multi-agency meetings in which professionals from similar or different welfare perspectives meet with service users is increasingly seen as a promising way to make decisions about how to solve complex problems. The hope is that this collaboration will increase the effectiveness of interventions and that the service user will be included in the process through their participation in the meeting (see Chapter 2 for a more thorough exploration of these tendencies). Although appealing, however, this ideal is challenged by numerous studies that show a more complex reality in practice. For instance, Hitzler and Messmer (2010) find that a service user's participation in a multi-agency meeting does not necessarily mean that they are included in decision making, while Dall (2020) shows that, even among professionals, decision-making responsibilities may not be equally distributed among participants, even when this is the stated ideal for the meeting.

Similar trends and challenges exist in Danish social welfare, and the interprofessional and multi-agency rehabilitation teams that were introduced as part of the active labour market policy in 2013 are one example of these tendencies. Rehabilitation team meetings are based in the employment services and meant to ensure interprofessional assessment and service user participation in cases where the service user's attachment to the labour market is at risk due to complex health issues, social problems or other challenges. This has proven a challenging task, as several of the professionals present in meetings are unfamiliar with the legislative and organisational context of the employment services (Dall, 2020). Furthermore, for vulnerable service users, the presence of five or more professionals who they have never met before can make meetings and participation in them daunting. In this environment, the role and behaviour of meeting chairs can be critical to collaboration and participation (Angouri and Marra, 2010). The enactment of relational agency – that is, the constant responsive interactions with other professionals and service users (Edwards, 2011; see also Chapter 2) – is crucial in this regard. Through their interactions, meeting chairs have a strong influence over two contrasting aspects in particular: how participants come together around defining and expanding the task at hand; and how boundaries are drawn around participants’ knowledge and expertise as well as their roles and responsibilities in meetings.