The professional role

In this section, I present relevant theoretical perspectives related to level B in Figure 1.

How professionals, such as social workers, handle their tasks relies on how they understand or interpret their jurisdiction and mandate. These

2014). Social workers represent a ‘social care’ perspective, while police and security workers represent a ‘societal security’ perspective (Sivenbring & Malmros, 2020). How this perspective transforms into professional practice is again related to interpretation and reasoning about the tasks at hand.

Goffman used the term framing to explain how we make sense of what we experience (Goffman, 1974). Framing can be seen in connection to Abbott’s term ‘inference’, which he referred to as the reasoning about a problem or task (Abbott, 1988). According to Goffman, framing is a cognitive, often unconscious, process of identifying what is happening in a specific situation. This process is based on primary social frameworks within a culture (Goffman, 1974) and influence how we act.

Role and impression management (Goffman, 1956) is important here as it is relevant to theorize and explain how social workers may adapt their presented self in the ambiguous field of preventing radicalisation and violent extremism. Through “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,”

Goffman uses the context of a theatre as a metaphor for human interactions. Goffman (1956) argues that, when a person interacts with another, he/she will attempt to control or guide the impression others have of him/her by adjusting his/her appearance or manner.

The act of impression management revolves around overcommunicating gestures and aspects of one’s performance that reinforce the desired self and, similarly, under-communicate the opposite (Lewin & Reeves, 2011). The actor’s main goal is to maintain a coherent role and adjust to

Theory

the setting. This may be played out either with sincerity or with cynicism, with the first referring to an act that the actor believes to be an expression of his/her own self and, thus, authentic and the latter referring to acting out for the means to an end (Goffman, 1956). These theoretical contributions by Goffman (Goffman, 1956, 1974) are relevant to this thesis because they may help us understand why Norwegian social workers’ understand their tasks and responsibilities as they do as well as how they enact their roles while interacting with their clients.

Regarding professional role and interaction with clients, few studies have explored how social workers understand and target the issues of radicalization and violent extremism, and none have researched this in the Norwegian context. In addition, there is little evidence of how these prevention efforts are carried out in direct client work, and descriptions of practice are often vague and general, like ‘counselling’ or

‘psychotherapy’, or come under the banner of conflict prevention or resilience training (Madriaza et al., 2017).

Previous research has shown that involvement of social workers in preventing radicalization and violent extremism has created uncertainty among social workers in the UK (Chisholm & Coulter, 2017; Dryden, 2017). In addition, in a multi-country study involving several professions, prevention workers felt unequipped to prevent violent extremism and wanted more training, support and dissemination of practice (Ponsot et al., 2017). While not having been tested in controlled studies, several approaches from social work have been suggested to be

useful in PVE, such as family interventions, strength-based approaches (Stanley et al., 2018), Socratic questioning (Bertelsen, 2018) and motivational interviewing (Clark, 2019). These strategies depend on trust between the professional providing the services and the client receiving such services (Barth et al., 2013), and they lead us into research on trust—how it may be constructed and its relevance to this thesis.

2.2.1 Trust

Trust is recognized as an essential part of social work (Behnia, 2008;

Smith, 2001), and the key for practitioners to understand service users, and vice versa, engaged in a common pursuit (Butler & Drakeford, 2005, p. 650). Trust is also important between workers in an organization (MacDuffie, 2011) and between organizations (Liu, 2015, p. 41), such as the agencies that aim to cooperate in multi-disciplinary PVE work.

A previous study by trust researchers Weber and Carter's (1998) led to an understanding of trust as something constructed between two people, relying on the premise that the other will take one’s perspective into account when making decisions (Weber & Carter, 2003, p. 19). As such, trust is a social phenomenon which exists between two individuals at least. Behnia (2008) found that research on trust in social worker–client relationships tends to either focus on the client’s trusting attitude, the professional’s trusting characteristics or the characteristics of the relationship that exists between the client and the professional. Based on this, Behnia (2008, p. 1438) argued that “a symbolic interactionist approach to trust development allows us to go beyond the initial trust and

Theory

to better explain the processes in which the client defines the professional as a competent and benevolent person with a positive attitude towards him/her”. This resonates well with what Weber and Carter (2003) did, who also presented the actual key ‘components’ in establishing trust.

They argue that building a relationship and creating trust are simultaneous processes and that the construction of trust allows for the establishment of interpersonal relationships between individuals (Weber

& Carter, 2003, p. 27). This process goes on within a social and power structure, where certain roles have trust embedded within them, such as parents to a child or police officers in some communities (Mourtgos et al., 2019). Social workers represent gatekeepers in the welfare system and can function as discussion partners for clients regarding their ideology. This, however, demands a certain degree of trust to accomplish. As such, the steps involved in the construction of trust, according to Weber and Carter (2003), are presented.

2.2.2 Time, self-disclosure and perspective-taking

According to Weber and Carter, the element of time has been discovered again and again as a key component in establishing trust. This finding is substantiated by the earlier studies by Schutz and Luckmann, who claim that the mere passage of time allows for the development of interpersonal relationships, and that this is an important factor to establish a relationships (Schutz & Luckmann, 1973). Building on this, spending time together creates opportunities for self-disclosure and perspective-taking, which builds trust in a relationship piece by piece. These two

elements are important to move from surface level relationships to interpersonal relationships, especially in a securitized field where roles might appear unclear for clients, and challenging for social workers.

Self-disclosure in a professional context is important and relevant for social work because roles and responsibilities may be unclear for clients.

Clarifying these roles and responsibilities leads to predictability of behaviour, which may interplay with time and perspective-taking in constructing a trusting relationship. On the other side of disclosure is the response to disclosure. As self-disclosure of sensitive information may alter the perception others have of us, some level of risk is involved. To further build trust, the response to self-disclosure is crucial, according to Weber and Carter (2003, p. 40). Self-disclosure in professional practice is also a good example of the logic and framing of social workers, as social care givers, not controllers. However, regarding the multi-agency cooperation, these strategies may also serve as contributors to the tension that arise between conflicting logics and expectations.

Importantly, Weber and Carter (2003) draw a clear distinction between being non-judgmental and always agreeing with what is disclosed by the other. This relates to the third main component in the construction of trust: perspective-taking. According to Mead (1934), perspective-taking entails an imaginative placing of one-self in the other’s shoes and viewing the world from the other person’ perspective. In addition to viewing the world from another individual’s perspective and the relational gain from doing so, perspective-taking is found to promote

Theory

forgiving and merely liking the other person (Noor & Halabi, 2018).

Trust is relational because it occurs within the confines of a personal and, sometimes intimate, relationships. Getting to that point requires time in real life interactions with other individuals, through the following steps:

self-disclosure, response to self-disclosure and perspective-taking over time (Weber & Carter, 2003, p. 47-48).

Creating trust is an important aspect of the PVE work between authorities and the target groups (Ponsot et al., 2017) and between the involved agencies (Sivenbring & Malmros, 2020). In the UK, distrust towards authorities is observed in Muslim communities because of overt government tactics (Clutterbuck, 2015) and a disproportionate focus on Muslims (Kundnani, 2012). In addition, somewhat similar results have been found in Belgium, where social workers engaging in cooperation with the police have experienced lack of trust from their target groups (Brion & Guittet, 2018). Hence, a possible consequence of this multi-agency cooperation is therefore the risk of impaired trust between social workers and their clients (Chisholm & Coulter, 2017; Herz, 2016).

This dimension and the theories presented above relate to the second research question (please see 1.5), which is about how Norwegian social workers view and handle cases when doing PVE.