Using Friendship to Build Professional Family Work Relationships where Child Neglect is an Issue: Worker Perceptions

“My work? Well, I live it and breathe it”: The seamless connect between the professional and personal/community self in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health sector

“…This shows Tia working in the Cultural Interface [ 36 ] as she is familiar with both sets of cultural expectations and needs to make decisions about who or what to challenge, accommodate or repair. Because Tia knows both cultural spaces she can see the space that is contested and can develop strategies for working in that contested space by engaging with her clients in a friendship-like way [ 61 ] while maintaining appropriate boundary work.…”

“…However, Marlene is also aware of the professional practices of her colleague that support turning off or being somewhat invisible during breaks at work or after work. Marlene lives and works in the contested space of the Cultural Interface and understands both ways of being, knowing and doing; she has developed strategies that allow her to maintain her professional responsibilities and her community responsibilities concurrently; she used friendship-like communication with her clients [ 49 , 61 ] to communicate with empathy while maintaining boundaries that were respected by both her clients and herself. Being on an official lunch break did not make Marlene feel invisible to clients; she had seamless visibility and has friendship-like ways of working to support her seamlessness.…”

“…This study presents findings that suggest Team Members have found ways to allow their professional and personal/community identities to coexist, allowing them to work and live in the same community with seamlessness; these strategies included using empathy as they communicated with clients, establishing and valuing boundaries that were understood by clients and the Team Members themselves and developing friendship-like connections with clients [ 49 , 61 ]. Literature presented earlier in this article identified both benefits and challenges in maintaining multiple workplace connections and relationships [ 42 , 43 ].…”

“…If Team Members’ managers and colleagues were encouraged to develop an understanding of how Team Members work at the Cultural Interface Team Members could potentially reap the emancipatory effects as their colleagues expand their world view and interpretations to include other people’s world views and ways of being, doing and knowing [ 38 ]. As such, I argue for health services to better understand and value the friendship-like [ 61 ] connections Team Members develop and engage in their work with clients. Team Members in this study adopted practices with clients that they felt comfortable with; they developed ways of being at home in community that they felt comfortable with.…”

Countering globalisation and managerialism: Relationist ethics in social work

“…Countering absolutist or relativist practice methods are three streams of relational thought. The first describes deeply interpersonal narrative approaches to client issues, recognising genuine relationships between clients and workers and the bilateral, reflexive self-definition that dynamically continues throughout (Borden, 2000;Ornstein and Ganzer, 2005;Reimer, 2013Reimer, , 2014. The second, following the French philosopher, Bruno Latour (2002Latour ( : 251-54, 2005Latour ( : 238-41, 2013, offers a critical approach to group perceptions and thereby to ethical practices with culturally diverse families.…”