Analysing collaboration and participation in multi-agency meeting interactions

This book has examined how policy trends that promote interprofessional collaboration and service user participation are implemented (or not) through frontline practices in multi-agency meetings. The challenges faced by service users are seen as complex and interconnected, demanding many kinds of expertise for them to be understood, assessed and resolved. As a result, collaboration and participation together have become the prevailing approach in health and social care policy in Western welfare states. Bringing together diverse viewpoints of professionals and service users is also thought to create boundary spaces that, at their best, produce joined-up thinking and constructive debate, resulting in novel ideas. Chapter 1 has provided a more thorough introduction to the trend and its ‘selling points’. In the literature, concepts such as ‘relational turn’, ‘relational agency’ and ‘responsive process’ have emerged in an effort to understand collaborative and integrated welfare and its potential for generating new common knowledge (Edwards, 2011). In this literature too, collaboration and participation are perceived as positive and desirable ideals. However, a number of concerns about the policy approach have also arisen and been presented in the literature. As outlined in Chapter 1, instead of equal collaboration, the policy may lead to:

• • loss of specialised expertise by professionals and service users;

• • a blurring of professional responsibilities;

• • increased responsibility being placed on service users to participate;

• • asymmetrical power relations between participants;

• • comprehensive surveillance of service users’ lives.

An overarching theme for the contributions in this volume has been whether and how collaborative and integrated welfare is present in frontline practices. There is a scarcity of research into the frontline practices of social welfare organisations, where professionals and service users encounter each other to tackle complex problems and implicitly do not always share the same goals. Hence, this book has focused on studying these interactions in multi-agency meetings in different settings, through audio- and video-recordings. Multi-agency meetings are boundary spaces in which professionals from different welfare agencies, service users and their lay representatives are brought together. As such, they are key practices in the realisation of policy aims and serve as a vantage point from which to study how policies are actually achieved in practice and what shape they take in everyday talk and interaction.