Assisting clients’ departure: On the multimodal organization of closings in social work

Interactional closings constitute a crucial aspect of social interaction and, in social work practice, are organized around participants’ orientation to an asymmetrical distribution of tasks between professional and client, informed by a “dialectics of care and control.” Proceeding from a conversation analytic framework, and grounded on video recordings of encounters between social workers and clients in diverse institutional settings in Portugal, the present paper investigates how the routine of closing social work encounters is carried out through professionals’ and clients’ joint and progressive orientation toward bringing the encounter to an end, and examines some of the interactional and embodied practices mobilized by them for accomplishing this task. By providing a detailed analysis of participants’ audible and visible conduct and their interactional practices, this study shows how social workers orchestrate clients’ leave-taking through the concerted mobilization of linguistic, bodily and material resources, shedding light into how the dialectics of care and control are managed in the everyday exercise of social intervention.