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When the larger objective matters more: support workers’ epistemic and deontic authority over adult service-users

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-05-20, 13:34 authored by Charles Antaki, Joseph Webb
We report on how support workers sometimes over-ride the wishes of people living with cognitive impairments. This can happen when they are both involved in some project (such as an institutionally-managed game, a physical journey, an educational activity and so on). The support worker might use their deontic authority (to propose, decide, or announce future actions) to do things that advance the over-arching project, in spite of proposals for what are cast as diversions from the person with impairments. They might also use their epistemic authority (their greater knowledge or cognitive capacity) to trump their clients' choices and preferences in subordinate projects. Not orienting to suggested courses of actions is generally interactionally dispreferred and troublesome, but, although the providers do sometimes orient to their actions as balking their clients' wishes, they usually do not, and encounter little resistance. We discuss how people with disabilities may resist or palliate such loss of control, and the dilemmas that support staff face in carrying out their duties.

Funding

Economic and Social Research Council. Grant Number: ES/M008339/1

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Sociology of Health and Illness

Volume

41

Issue

8

Pages

1549 - 1567

Citation

ANTAKI, C. and WEBB, J., 2019. When the larger objective matters more: support workers’ epistemic and deontic authority over adult service-users. Sociology of Health and Illness, 41 (8), pp.1549-1567.

Publisher

Wiley © The Authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2019-05-15

Publication date

2019-06-18

Notes

This is an Open Access article. It is published by Wiley under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

0141-9889

Language

  • en