"Recovery" in Action: An Institutional Ethnography of Addictions Counselling Work
Date
2015-04-22
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Abstract
Traditionally, much of the published literature about addictions counselling has focused on research supporting evidence-based approaches to treatment, establishing and maintaining best practices to achieve and maintain recovery, and prescribing how therapeutic interventions ought to be delivered. Little attention has been directed toward translating recovery into something that is done in the day-to-day work of counsellors within addictions treatment institutions, nor how this doing is socially organized more broadly. In this inquiry I used D. E. Smith’s institutional ethnography to call attention to the social organization of frontline recovery work within a residential treatment Centre. The everyday work of addictions counsellors was the focus of my ethnographic interest, and connecting this work into larger social and institutional policies and procedures was the focus of my analysis. First, I explored the work of admissions counselling that takes place prior to a client entering the treatment program. Next, I focused my analysis on how the counsellors facilitate the treatment program, and identified disjunctures between the embodied experiences of frontline practitioners and enforced institutional counselling discourses and requirements. Finally, I explicated the process of producing institutionally acceptable accounts of the recovery work that has taken place. I looked at the invisible addictions counselling work being done at the Centre to accomplish the ends of recovery with clients, and I identified institutional practices that obscured this work from view. I concluded with an enhanced understanding of recovery work as something that is done by counsellors, with clients, within the context of addictions treatment. Implications for counselling practice and possible future research are discussed, as the findings expand what can be seen and known from the frontlines of practice.
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Psychology--Clinical
Citation
Doyle, E. M. (2015). "Recovery" in Action: An Institutional Ethnography of Addictions Counselling Work (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27564