This book helps professionals find new ways to foster trust and collaboration. Rethinking providing and receiving services in child welfare, addiction treatment, mental health, doctoring, palliative care, and more, it proves through everyday examples that these goals cannot be met without quality, interpersonal interaction.

Preface Acknowledgments Part I. The Human Service Relationship 1. From the Iron Cage to Everyday Life, by Jaber F. Gubrium Part II. Service User Perspectives 2. Professional Intervention from a Service User Perspective, by Tone Alm Andreassen 3. Expertise and Ambivalence in User-Focused Human Service Work, by Margaretha Jarvinen 4. Flipping the Script: Managing and Reimagining Outpatient Addiction Treatment, by E. Summerson Carr 5. Service Users' Negotiated Identity in a Social Enterprise and the Opportunity for Reflection in Action, by Eve E. Garrow 6. Between Control and Surrender in Terminal Illness, by Geraldine Foley and Virpi Timonen Part III. Professional Work 7. New Relations Between "Professionals" and Disabled Service Users, by Per Koren Solvang 8. The Use of Elder-Clowning to Foster Relational Citizenship in Dementia Care, by Karen-Lee Miller and Pia Kontos 9. Managing the Complexity of Family Contact in Child Welfare, by Tarja Poso 10. Risk, Trust, and the Complex Sentiments of Enacting Care, by Amanda Grenier and Cristi Flood 11. "Civil Disobedience" and Conflicting Rationalities in Elderly Care, by Signe Mie Jensen and Kaspar Villadsen Part IV. Reimagined Service Relationships 12. Mental Health Self-Knowledge: Crossing Borders with Recovery Colleges and Tojisha Kenkyu, by Tom Shakespeare and Rachael Collins 13. Tension and Balance in Teaching "The Patient Perspective" to Mental Health Professionals, by Erik Eriksson and Katarina Jacobsson 14. Reimagining the Doctor-Patient Relationship, by Ian Greener 15. Who's Who and Who Cares? Personal and Professional Identities in Welfare Services, by Marian Barnes 16. Border Work: Negotiating Shifting Regimes of Power, by Janet Newman Contributors Index

Reimagining the Human Service Relationship fills a void by theorizing the social, organizational, and policy construction of the service relationship and providing a cross-national perspective on service contexts with case studies, ethnographies, and qualitative research examples tying theory to praxis. -- Suzanne England, New York University Silver School of Social Work Speak to anyone on the receiving end of 'helping services' and they will say it is the relationship between practitioner and service user that is everything. However important it is, relationship-based practice has not been served well by modern managerialism and bureaucratization. What is important about this book is its focus on that relationship. Reimagining the Human Service Relationship explores how it may help and the new forms it may take with user involvement and service users as practitioners, and offers fresh insights to support its flowering in the future. -- Peter Beresford, Brunel University London Reimagining the Human Service Relationship exemplifies a too-rare collaboration across ideas and substance, and between those working mainly in North America, Nordic countries, and the United Kingdom. From Jaber F. Gubrium's lucid and provoking opener, the contributors to this carefully integrated text draw in the reader. -- Ian Shaw, University of York and University of Aalborg The editors have succeeded in bringing together a group of international scholars to address a pressing issue encountered across human service provision, namely, how to conceptualize a meaningful service relationship that has validity at this historical moment. Drawing on research that questions the very existence of the divide between users and providers, Reimagining the Human Service Relationship offers thought-provoking insights that challenge both policy and practice. -- Sheila Neysmith, University of Toronto An insightful collection of essays that illuminate the everyday dynamism of human service provision and the futility of adequately capturing this with experience-distant distinctions such as professional/client and autonomy/dependency. A must-read for students, scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and anyone else hoping to grasp the working realities of the service relationship. -- Darin Weinberg, University of Cambridge

This book rethinks traditional networks of exchange so that professionals can find new ways to foster trust and collaboration within modern management strategies. The text redefines the contours, roles, institutional divisions, means, and aims of providing and receiving services in child welfare, addiction treatment, social enterprise, doctoring, mental health, and palliative care. It proves through everyday examples that the goals of service provision cannot be met without quality, interpersonal interaction.