Contingent Control and Wild Moments: Conducting Psychiatric Evaluations in the Home

Robert M. Emerson and Melvin Pollner
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Robert M. Emerson: Department of Sociology, University of California – Los Angeles, USA
Melvin Pollner: Department of Sociology, University of California – Los Angeles, USA

Social Inclusion, 2019, vol. 7, issue 1, 259-268

Abstract: When social control and social service workers go into the field, into the “native habitat” of some problem, a variety of tacit structures and controls that mark office work with its standardized documents and formal meetings are weakened or absent entirely. As a result, compared to office settings, social control work in field settings tends to become open, contingent, unpredictable, and on occasion even wild. This article provides a strategic case study of the distinctive features of social control decision-making in the field, drawing on observations of field work by psychiatric emergency teams (PET) from the 1970s. PET typically went to the homes of psychiatrically-troubled persons in order to conduct evaluations for involuntary mental hospitalization. This article will analyze the varied, situationally-sensitive practices these workers adopted to evaluate such patients in their own homes.

Keywords: clientization; field psychiatry; frontline decision-making; social control; home visits (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:socinc:v7:y:2019:i:1:p:259-268

DOI: 10.17645/si.v7i1.1788

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