Organizational Categories as Viewing Categories: Evaluating Clients' Personality Traits in two Danish Rehabilitation Organizations

This paper explores how two Danish rehabilitation organizations textual guidelines for assessment of clients' personality traits influence the actual evaluation of clients. The analysis will show how staff members produce institutional identities corresponding to organizational categories, which very often have little or no relevance for the clients evaluated. The goal of the article is to demonstrate how the institutional complex that frames the work of the organizations produces the client types pertaining to that organization. By applying the analytical strategy of institutional ethnography I elucidate how the two rehabilitation organizations local history, legislation, structural features of the present labour market and of social work result in a number of contradictions which make it difficult to deliver client-centred care. This exact goal is according to the staff one of the most important goals for `good' social work.