Goals and roles: Institutional, organizational, and individual influences on social worker-lawyer collaboration

Both common wisdom and the majority of scholarly work on collaboration between social workers and lawyers suggest that conflict between the values, ethics, focus, and methods of these two professions makes collaboration difficult, if not impossible. The limited body of literature on the topic of collaboration between social workers and lawyers focuses largely on interpersonal aspects of the working relationship and the potential ethical conflicts posed by the collaborative working relationship. This literature is largely conceptual rather than empirical, however. It neglects the importance of the context in which social workers and lawyers collaborate and assumes that conflict is the defining feature of this interdisciplinary collaboration.;This dissertation extends the previous conceptual literature in that it is driven by both theory and by empirical data. The study is a comparative case study of three organizations that employ both social workers and lawyers. Data were collected through intensive open-ended interviews with social workers, lawyers, and administrators in these agencies, observations of the daily interactions between social workers and lawyers, and a review of documents generated by the agencies.;Contrary to previous work, these data suggest that the working relationship between social workers and lawyers is characterized more accurately by ambiguity than by conflict. The major theme that emerged from these data is that the collaboration between social workers and lawyers in these legal settings is fraught with ambiguity. This is not to suggest that conflict is absent from the collaboration between social workers and lawyers, but that conflict is in many ways secondary to ambiguity.;This transfer of focus from conflict between social workers and lawyers to the ambiguity of the social worker's role in the legal setting creates a new view of what it means to be a social worker in interdisciplinary settings. Rather than a story of ongoing conflict, the story becomes one of social workers continually striving to understand, carve out, and define their role in the legal setting. Activities undertaken to transform ambiguity into certainty become a central task of the job.;This dissertation concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for both social work practice in legal settings and for future research on the collaboration between social workers and lawyers.