ABSTRACT

Supervision is promoted as an essential element of effective professional practice in social work. Its benefits include promoting reflective social work and assisting with the management of the emotions generated in challenging practice. This article reports on the observations of supervision in a 15-month ethnographic study of social work teams on two very different sites in England, one using hot-desking the other a small team design. Our findings show how supervision is constituted by temporal, spatial and relational elements and that some current organisational designs do not create the ideal environment for reflective supervision to flourish. Far from providing an opportunity for containment of challenging emotions, supervision was sometimes a source of stress. It was experienced as reflective and containing where managers were accessible and space was made for thinking in a context of openness that encouraged regular deep conversations about current work. By experiencing the atmospheres of supervisory encounters and organisational cultures, this study has enabled us to produce new insights into the embodied nature of supervision as it is lived.

摘要

监督被提升为社会工作中有效专业实践的基本要素。它的好处包括促进反思性社会工作和协助管理在具有挑战性的实践中产生的情绪。本文报道了对英格兰两个不同地点的社会工作团队进行的为期 15 个月的民族志研究中的监督观察结果，一个使用共享办公，另一个使用小型团队设计。我们的研究结果表明，监督是如何由时间、空间和关系元素构成的，并且一些当前的组织设计并没有为反思性监督的蓬勃发展创造理想的环境。监督远非提供遏制挑战性情绪的机会，有时反而是压力的来源。它被认为是反思性的，包含了管理者可以接触到的地方，并在开放的环境中为思考创造了空间，鼓励就当前工作进行定期深入的对话。通过体验监管遭遇和组织文化的氛围，这项研究使我们能够对监管的具体本质产生新的见解。