Drawing on a three-year ethnographically oriented study exploring contemporary professional social work writing, this article focuses on a key concern: the amount of time taken up with writing, or “paperwork.” We explore the relationship between time and professional social work writing in three key ways: (a) as a discrete, measurable phenomenon—how much time is spent on writing? (b) as a textual dimension to social work writing—how do institutional documents drive particular entextualizations of time and how do social worker texts entextualize time? (c) as a particular timespace configuration of lived experience—how is time experienced by professional social workers? Findings indicate that a dominant institutional chronotope is governing social work textual practice underpinned by an ideology of writing that is at odds with social workers’ desired practice and professional goals. Methodologically, this article illustrates the value of combining a range of data and analytic tools, using textual and contextual data as well as qualitative and quantitative frames of analysis.

本文基于为期三年的以人种学为导向的研究，探讨了当代专业社会工作写作，重点关注了一个关键问题：写作或“文书工作”所花费的时间。我们通过三种主要方式探索时间与专业社会工作写作之间的关系：（a）作为离散的，可测量的现象-写作花费了多少时间？（b）作为社会工作写作的文本方面—机构文件如何驱动特定的时间文本化，社会工作者文本如何将时间文本化？（c）作为生活经验的特定时空配置-专业社会工作者如何体验时间？研究结果表明，占主导地位的制度编年史统治着社会工作的文字实践，其写作意识形态与社会工作者的理想实践和职业目标背道而驰。从方法上讲，本文说明了结合使用文本和上下文数据以及定性和定量分析框架将一系列数据和分析工具结合在一起的价值。