Sociology of Health & Illness Vol. 37 No. 7 2015 ISSN 0141-9889, pp. 1072–1085 doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12285

Nut clusters and crisps: atrocity stories and co-narration in interviews with approved mental health professionals Lisa Morriss Institute of Brain, Behaviour and Mental Health, Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, University of Manchester, UK

Abstract

The article explores the telling of co-narrated atrocity stories in accomplishing professional identity. Building on previous work, it is argued that group membership is a prerequisite for such stories to be told. Extracts from empirical data from interviews with social work approved mental health professionals are analysed using an ethnomethodological approach. The findings show how atrocity stories can be co-narrated, not only by longstanding colleagues, but also by two unacquainted persons who share the same professional identity. The article concludes that the ethnomethodological concepts of vulgar competency, unique adequacy, indexicality and the documentary method of interpretation are key to understanding the accomplishment of co-narrated atrocity stories.

Keywords: social work, atrocity stories, professional identity, interviews, co-narration, ethnomethodology Introduction The objective of the article is to contribute to knowledge about the accomplishment of professional identity. Specifically, the article explores the telling of atrocity stories in accomplishing identity and demarcating professional boundaries. While most studies of atrocity stories have tended to be concerned with the boundary between medicine and nursing (Timmons and Tanner 2004), here the focus is on social workers who are based in community mental health teams (CMHT). Using a narrative approach (Mishler 1986, Riessman 2007), 17 mental health social workers were interviewed, either individually or as part of one small group interview. In each of the interviews the social workers told stories about other professionals in the CMHT and it became apparent that these were ‘atrocity’ stories. The term atrocity stories was created by Gerry Stimson and Barbara Webb in their book, Going to See the Doctor (Stimson and Webb 1975). Stimson and Webb examined women patients’ retrospective accounts of their contact with the medical profession. The patients told atrocity stories about doctors to each other during group discussions or in informal conversations observed by Stimson and Webb. The stories were told as eye witness accounts and had a dramatic quality. Stimson and Webb (1975: 107) argued that the stories were a way in which the patients could redress the inequalities in their relationship with doctors and concluded that by ‘laughing at the professional, he is degraded’. Although not explicitly referring to the documentary method of interpretation, Stimson and Webb (1975) stated that they adopted Garfinkel’s method in order to show that © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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common understandings or background expectancies were crucial in understanding the stories. The article will begin with a brief review of previous work on atrocity stories. The aim of the article is to extend previous work by examining a previously unexplored aspect of atrocity stories; the notion of co-narration. Building on the work of Donna Eder (1988), two extracts from empirical data are analysed to show how the social workers in a small group interview co-narrated an atrocity story and how an atrocity story was co-narrated in an individual interview. It will be argued that sharing the same social work identity allowed for the accomplishment of co-narrated atrocity stories in the interview-as-interaction. Moreover, the second extract is a story about another social worker, rather than a professional from a different occupational group. While this ostensibly differs from the presentation of the ‘occupation members as hero’ (Dingwall 1977a: 375) which has been found in previous work on atrocity stories, it is argued that this is a very artful telling in which the social worker in this story is positioned as a non-group member. The ethnomethodological concepts of vulgar competency, unique adequacy, indexicality and the documentary method of interpretation (Garfinkel 1967) are used to inform the discussion. The focus of ethnomethodological research is exclusively on members’ methods; the ‘haecceities, just thisness; just here, just now, with just what is at hand, with just who is here’ (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992: 203). Thus, where the participants are a group that uses more specialised practices, the researcher needs to be ‘vulgarly competent’ in these practices so as to recognise, identify, be able to follow, and describe the interaction (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992: 182). This is the unique adequacy requirement of methods. Approved mental health professionals The UK government has produced a plethora of policy documents relating to the mental health workforce in England since 2003, including the Ten Essential Shared Capabilities for Mental Health Practice (Department of Health [DOH] 2004); and the new ways of working reports (National Institute for Mental Health England 2004, DOH, 2005, Care Services Improvement Partnership and National Institute for Mental Health in England 2007). These documents addressed workforce challenges in mental health and proposed the extension of traditionally defined roles and the creation of new roles. The article is concerned with one of these new roles: the approved mental health professional (AMHP). The Mental Health Act 2007, implemented in November 2008, (DOH 2007) made a fundamental change in the role of mental health social workers in England by extending the unique functions of the approved social worker to health professionals in the CMHT. This means that nurses, psychologists and occupational therapists can also train to become what is now called an AMHP. The focus of this article is on social work AMHPs. Initially based in social services departments in a local authority with other social workers, mental health social workers have been separated from other social workers and are now based in health trusts with health professionals where there may be only one or two social workers in any one team. Thus, these social workers are located in an inter-professional inter-agency CMHT in a context where professional boundaries are shifting and confusion is caused by role blurring. The article explores the telling of co-narrated atrocity stories in accomplishing identity and demarcating boundaries in such a context. A brief overview of previous work on atrocity stories This section gives a brief overview of significant previous work on atrocity stories by Robert Dingwall (1977a, 1977b), Geoffrey Baruch (1981) and Davina Allen (2001). In his ethnography of health visitors, Dingwall (1977a, 1977b) widened Stimson and Webb’s (1975) conception of atrocity stories. The health visitors in Dingwall’s study told atrocity stories about doctors, ward nurses and social workers and Dingwall showed how these stories performed different functions in relation to the different professions. Whereas the stories about doctors © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness

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were an attempt to blur a sharp distinction between inequalities of status, those concerning nurses and social workers were an attempt to sharpen a blurred distinction, ‘demarcating between their respective zones of competence’ (Dingwall 1977a: 147). Dingwall (1977a: 145) concluded that such accounts are prevalent ‘whenever attempts are being made to control the lives of a group by others whose claim to competence to justify such action is seen as illegitimate’. Like Stimson and Webb, he concluded that the stories can be seen as strategies of resistance by the weaker party in a power relationship and thus are a mark of social friction. Dingwall (1977a: 151) confirmed Stimson and Webb’s assertion about the degree to which stories trade on shared knowledge. Finally, like Stimson and Webb, Dingwall (1977a: 155) was not concerned with the ontological status of these stories, arguing that they were ‘elements of the oral culture of a group which epitomise aspects of that culture’ rather like proverbs or parables. Thus, Dingwall extended Stimson and Webb’s conception of atrocity stories as attempts to redress perceived inequalities between lay people and professionals, to a way of managing the problems of exclusion and inclusion between different professional groups. In this way, then, the stories can be seen as a method of delineating professional boundaries. Like Stimson and Webb, Baruch (1981) examined the atrocity stories told by lay people about their encounters with doctors. In Baruch’s study, the atrocity stories were told in interviews by the parents of children who attended a paediatric cardiology unit or who were being treated for cleft palate/hare lip conditions in a children’s hospital. Baruch (1981: 276) found that the parents accomplished the status of moral adequacy through these stories by presenting themselves as ‘moral persons, competent members and adequate performers’. Unlike the work of Stimson and Webb and Dingwall, the article by Baruch (1981) provides a detailed examination of how the moral displays by the parents were accomplished through the atrocity story. However, Baruch was not concerned with professional identity, which is the focus of this article. Like Dingwall, Allen (2001) focused on the boundary work between different professional groups in her ethnography of a general hospital. A qualified nurse, Allen examined the atrocity stories told by nurses on a hospital ward. Allen positioned her work as building on that of Dingwall but as different in two important respects. Although Dingwall explored the different social actions for which stories can be used, he was not concerned with how these are actually accomplished. Like Baruch, Allen’s analysis pays closer attention to the rhetorical and interactional detail of the stories nurses tell. Secondly, Allen argued that Dingwall presented atrocity stories as a way of handling conflict when its overt expression is constrained. In contrast to this psychological explanation, Allen concentrated on the interactional work that atrocity stories demonstrably do, treating nurses’ atrocity stories as a form of boundary-work. Allen found that telling atrocity stories was the principal mechanism through which ward nurses established a sense of occupational difference and constituted nursing as a bounded occupation. In her article, Allen does not discuss the unique adequacy requirement of methods or vulgar competency (Garfinkel 2002) but it seems fairly clear that, in ethnomethodological terms, at times Allen engaged in ‘doing being’ a nurse during the research process (see below). The nurses in Allen’s study mainly told atrocity stories about doctors. Allen stated that this was not surprising, as nursing and medicine overlap considerably, with nurses as subordinate players. This connects with Dingwall’s (1977a) findings about health visitors, as both they and nurses are in a marginal position. Allen (2001) concluded that these stories accomplished boundary-work in three interrelated ways: they employed contrastive rhetoric, juxtaposing the medical and nursing perspective; they isolated the doctor, aligning the story recipient(s) with the nursing standpoint; and finally, they formulated nurses’ problems with doctors as a patterned part of the collective experience, thus underlining their common occupational identity. Allen (2001: 76) argued that the atrocity stories performed dual boundary-work: that is, the rhetorical form of the stories and the storytelling practices function to create a moral boundary © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness

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between nurses and medical staff, simultaneously working to constitute membership in the colleague group. Allen showed how by using specialised language and trading on taken-forgranted knowledge, nurses’ stories work to constitute the local colleague group. The work of Stimson and Webb, Dingwall, Baruch, and Allen will be used to inform the analysis of the extracts from my research project.

Methods The empirical work presented here is taken from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded study exploring the identity of social work approved mental health professionals (AMHPs) who were seconded to mental health trusts (Morriss 2014a). The objectives of the wider study were threefold: to explore how the social work identity of social work AMHPs based in mental health trusts was accomplished using an ethnomethodological approach; to investigate the impact that the implementation of the Mental Health Act 2007 has had on the social work identity of social workers in mental health teams and to contribute to the development of the ethnomethodological approach in the context of mental health social work research. The study was approved by the University of Salford’s Research Ethics Panel (REP11/067). The interviews were audio-taped with the consent of the participants, transcribed in full, fully anonymised and analysed using an ethnomethodological approach. Originally the research plan was to undertake individual interviews with social work AMHPs. However, a network of five social work AMHPs who had chosen to remain based separately from the rest of the mental health team asked to be interviewed. After discussion, we agreed that a group interview would be the best way to proceed and further ethical approval was obtained to accommodate this request. To include geographically dispersed participants, I chose participants from health trusts all over England; some from metropolitan areas and others from more rural areas. Where there was more than one response from any area, the second person was interviewed. In line with the advice of Seale (1999) and Riessman (2007), a full account of the methodological decisions made during the project is explicated in the account of the wider study (see Morriss 2014a).

Findings Two extracts from the empirical data are analysed in this section; one from the group interview and the other from an individual interview. The first extract examines how the social workers in the group interview co-narrated an atrocity story and the second extract explores how an atrocity story was co-narrated in an individual interview. A story about number clusters and nut clusters Several co-narrated atrocity stories were told during the group interview. As a group of AMHPs from the same team, the five members of the group all shared the same social work identity and thus were ‘cultural colleagues’. Taylor and White (2000: 122) argue that where members of one profession are engaged in talk, a ‘process of co-narration, where different speakers “chip in” with affirming statements, reinforces the rhetorical force of what is a partial reading of a case’. Eder (1988) examined collaborative personal narratives among adolescent girls and defined collaborative talk as where an utterance supports or ratifies the previous utterance in some manner. When two or more people are involved in generating a narrative, they not only need to maintain the coherence of the narration but also need to connect turns © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness

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discussion in the notes section. In note 2, Baruch (1981) observed that the atrocity stories often took a truncated form in the formal part of the interview but were then repeated in an elaborate manner during the informal stage. Baruch explained this in terms of the parents’ conception of the interviewer. Baruch (1981) found that offering ‘unreserved criticisms’ was ‘initially problematic’ (p. 294, n.) as the parents saw the researchers as connected to the hospital. However, it ‘soon became apparent that we were sympathetically disposed towards their point of view’ (p.294, n.) and: (F)rom an analysis of the talk, it will be seen that our utterances display us as members who share and affirm our respondents’ everyday ‘reality’. Thus the repetition and elaboration of their stories was in order. (Baruch 1981: 294n) Thus, for Baruch, the atrocity stories were told to them once the parents saw them as members. Furthermore, Dingwall (1977a: 145) argued that atrocity stories ‘play an important part in defining the colleague group, those to whom one can tell such stories and from whom one receives them’. He concluded that: [A]cquiring an appropriate repertoire of such stories and being able to identify appropriate occasions for telling them are important parts of becoming recognized as a competent member of an occupation. (Dingwall 1977b: 29) For Dingwall, it was only the occupational members who could tell such stories and they did so only where most of the audience shared the same group identity. He observed that while the student health visitors would criticise nurses when they were together as a group, they were very reluctant to accept criticism from anyone else or to voice it publically. Dingwall (1977a: 158) noted that in ‘the presence of non-members, like myself, story-telling becomes much more problematic’. Finally, in contrast, the nurses in Allen’s (2001) study told atrocity stories in front of and directly to her. Significantly, Allen (2001: 84) described how she also told atrocity stories ‘of my own to establish rapport with the research participants and present myself as someone who knew “how things really were”’. Crucially here, Allen shared the same professional identity as her nurse participants and so was arguably seen as a group member. Thus, at the times in the interviews when the social workers told atrocity stories, they can be seen as treating me as a social work group member. I was a group member in the sense that Garfinkel (2006: 197) described: ‘If Y treats X as a group member, then X is a group member’. At those times, in ethnomethological terms, we were ‘talking as bona fide professional practitioners about usual demands, usual attainments, and usual practices’ (Garfinkel 1967: 14). This was most apparent in the extract in the individual interview with Ed, where we co-narrated the atrocity story. It must be noted, however, that other identities were made relevant at other times in the interview-as-interaction. In the extract from the group interview, for example, I was positioned as interviewer, report-writer and social work researcher.

Conclusions The aim of the article has been to explore the atrocity stories told by social work AMHPs. In line with previous studies, the stories can be seen as a form of boundary demarcation, distinguishing group members from outsiders. Indeed, it has been argued that being a group member is necessary for atrocity stories to be told. Thus, atrocity stories were told by the social work members of a group interview. In addition, atrocity stories were told in an © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness

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References Abell, J., Locke, A., Condor, S., Gibson, S. et al. (2006) Trying similarity, doing difference: the role of interviewer self-disclosure in interview talk with young people, Qualitative Research, 6, 2, 221–44. Allen, D. (2001) Narrating nursing jurisdiction: ‘atrocity stories’ and ‘boundary work’, Symbolic Interaction, 24, 1, 75–103. Baruch, G. (1981) Moral tales: parents’ stories of encounters with the health profession, Sociology of Health & Illness, 3, 3, 275–96. Buttny, R. (1997) Reported speech in talking race on campus, Human Communication Research, 23, 4, 477–506. Care Services Improvement Partnership and National Institute for Mental Health in England (2007) Mental Health: New Ways of Working for Everyone: Developing and Sustaining a Capable and Flexible Workforce: London: Care Services and Improvement Partnership and National Institute for Mental Health in England. Department of Health (DOH) (2004) The ten essential shared capabilities: a framework for the whole of the mental health workforce. London: DOH. DOH (2005) New Ways of Working for Psychiatrists: Enhancing Effective, Person-Centred Services through New Ways of Working in Multi-Disciplinary and Multi-Agency Contexts. London: DOH. DOH (2007) The Mental Health Act. London: Department of Health. Dingwall, R. (1977a) The Social Organisation of Health Visitor Training. London: Croom Helm. Dingwall, R. (1977b) Atrocity stories and professional relationships, Sociology of Work and Occupations, 4, 4, 317–96. Eder, D. (1988) Building cohesion through collaborative narration, Social Psychology Quarterly, 5, 3, 225–35. Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, H. (2002) Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Garfinkel, H. (2006) Seeing Sociologically: the Routine Grounds of Social Action. Edited Anne Warfield Rawls. Boulder: Paradigm. Garfinkel, H. and Sacks, H. (1970) On formal structures of practical actions. In McKinney, J.C. and Tiryakian, E.A. (eds) Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments. New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts. Garfinkel, H. and Wieder, D.L. (1992) Two incommensurable, asymmetrically alternate technologies of social analysis. In Watson, G. and Seiler, R.M. (eds) Text in Context: Studies in Ethnomethodology. Newbury Park: Sage. Hall, C., Juhila, K., Matarese, M. and van Nijnatte, C. (2014) Analyzing Social Work Communication. Abingdon: Routledge. Health and Social Care Information Centre (n.d.) National Health Service Data Model and Dictionary Service. Available at http://www.datadictionary.nhs.uk/ (accessed 22 February 2015). Mazeland, H. and ten Have, P. (1996) Essential tensions in (semi) open research interviews. In Maso, I. and Wester, F. (eds) The Deliberate Dialogue: Qualitative Perspectives on the Interview. Brussels: VUB University Press. Mishler, E.G. (1986) Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Morriss, L. (2014a) Accomplishing social work identity in interprofessional mental health teams following the implementation of the Mental Health Act 2007. Unpublished PhD thesis. Manchester, University of Salford. Morriss, L. (2014b) Accomplishing social work identity through non-seriousness: an ethnomethodological approach, Qualitative Social Work, doi:10.1177/1473325014552282. Mathieson, M. (2010) Undercover social worker, Dispatches. London: Hardcash. National Heath Service (NHS) Data Model and Dictionary Service (n.d.) Home page. Available at http:// www.datadictionary.nhs.uk/data_dictionary/nhs_business_definitions/m/mental_health_care_cluster_de.asp?shownav=1) (accessed 10 February 2015). © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness

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25. John: 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

just highlighting one case, a care officer who did a good job with the client but it was taken off as it he was too complex for her and I was saying ‘I think it should be back with her’. ‘I don’t know because what’s he clustered at what’s he clustered at?’ They were putting the cluster before the client or as they would call them, the patient. ‘Oh they can have that because he’s clustered at seventeen’. That’s totally wrong. That’s cart before the horse, every time.

Tim extends my reply in a co-narration [‘they’re failing’. . . ‘through numbers yeah’]. In his turn, Tim shifts from serious to non-serious talk, resulting in shared laughter. The laughter can be seen as both reflecting and contributing to a process of bonding as members of the same profession (Morriss 2014b). Tim’s reply orientates the group to the interview situation by referring to my report. In doing this, he is positioning me as a researcher undertaking an interview for a report. This is curious as I made reference to my thesis and my project at the beginning of the interview (and in the participant information sheet) but not to a report. However, Tim may have used this description as report-writing is something that is hearable as tied to the work of social work. Although I join in with the laughter and acknowledge Tim, it is noticeable that I do not expand on this but instead immediately attempt to re-orientate the discussion back to the narrative with the phrase ‘but that’s awful isn’t it’. This can be seen as a disjunctive topic/sequence shift (Schegloff 2007). Here I am doing what could be glossed as ‘doing putting the interview back on track’ by positioning what went prior as an insert or side-sequence. As one anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this article suggested, this is hearable in Tim’s talk in that he produces this as a side-sequence, an emerging thought. This exchange can be seen as an example of the tension inherent in the interview interaction (Mazeland and ten Have 1996). I wanted the group to keep to my agenda. However, such disjunctive shifts require the collaboration of co-participants (Schegloff 2007); Isobel’s reply supplies this by continuing the talk about the failures of health. Tim’s phrase, ‘failure through numbers’, alludes to the earlier discussion about clustering and people being categorised as numbers. Once again, this is an example of the documentary method of interpretation; ‘understood though a process of attending to the temporal series of utterances as documentary evidences of a developing conversation rather than as a string of terms’ (Garfinkel 1967: 39). Here, rather than continuing with Isobel’s topic, John picks up on Tim’s allusion with a story preface (Sacks 1992), introducing an atrocity story which again shows the failings of health in relation to service users. It is significant here that the care officer who is doing a ‘good job’ is a local authority employee seconded to the health trust and so is aligned with the social workers. The use of reported speech here adds dramaturgical interest and John does not even have to specify who is speaking; as bona fide members it is clear to us all that ‘they’ is a health professional. Using the pronoun ‘they’ can be seen as a distancing device: it polarises two groups in terms of ‘we’ and ‘them’. Additionally, by using the general term ‘they’ rather than assigning the reported speech to one named individual, this perspective can then be attributed to a collective group of people, namely, health professionals in general. This allows the speaker to epitomise a group through the characteristic utterances of the ‘prototypical group member’ (Buttny 1997: 499). John continues by making a direct contrast between the social work language of ‘client’ and what ‘they’ (health) would call a ‘patient’ (line 29). Moreover, ‘he’s clustered at seventeen’ comes off as organisational or bureaucratic language. Again, by contrasting the differing use of language, John is depicting the fundamental distinction in the approach to mental health service users as outlined earlier. Finally, the phrase ‘putting the cluster before the client’ mirrors the English proverb ‘putting the cart before the horse’ which John then uses as the coda to the © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness

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story. Health is therefore positioned as reversing the right way of doing things – that is, the social work way. The moral of this atrocity story is that there is a clear difference in the approach to service users: health professionals erroneously see people in terms of numbers and categories and only social workers can see that this is a reversal of the right approach, namely, focusing on the needs of service users. The talk can be seen as a resistive practice (Saario 2012) in which the social workers are taking a critical stance against the language and approaches of the dominant medical model. Isobel continues the discussion. Extract 3 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Isobel: Lucy: Isobel: Lisa:

it’s more gate-keeping it is you only like nut clusters don’t you? [All laugh] Not the number clusters. Is there anything else anybody would like to say?

The final exchange can be seen as a topic/sequence-closing sequence. Together, we collaboratively and interactionally close the extended sequence with three turns (Schegloff 2007). Isobel and Lucy’s affirming statements display affiliation by supporting and endorsing John’s stance (Stivers 2008). Isobel collaborates in closing down the topic by using humour to display her alignment with the prior turn, leading to shared laughter. Finally, I co-narrate a final closing assessment and then add to the closure completion by initiating a new topic (Schegloff 2007). Indeed, in asking the social workers if they want to add anything, I am initiating the closing sequence of the whole interview. Here, then, like Tim earlier, I am making their identity relevant as participants in a research project. This section has examined the use of co-narration in the telling of atrocity stories. Like the girls in Eder’s (1988) study, the members of the group interview were long established social work colleagues. As vulgarly competent members, the social workers were able to understand the indexical expressions and successfully accomplish the co-narrated talk. The next section examines how co-narration was also accomplished in an individual interview with an AMHP that I have called Ed. A story about crisps This is an interesting atrocity story because, unlike previous work, it is not about others, such as members of other professions (Allen, 2001, Dingwall, 1977a, 1977b) or by lay people about doctors (Baruch 1981, Stimson and Webb 1975). Instead, it is a member of the same profession that is the subject of the atrocity story. Here, in an individual interview, Ed and I co-narrate a story about a social worker in a TV show. Ed has been talking about the possibility that a generic mental health qualification will be introduced in the future and I have asked for clarification about whether he sees this as being based on the medical or the social model. This leads to some ironic banter about the other which is detailed in Morriss (2014b). Ed then asks me a question: Extract 4 1. 2. 3. 4.

Ed: Lisa: Ed:

Social workers – did you ever see that documentary? You must have seen that documentary exposure Yes which was fixed a bit because the guy had. There was this brilliant (continued) © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness

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Lisa: Ed: Lisa: Ed: Lisa: Ed: Lisa: Ed:

Ed:

footage I mean, even I had to admire it’s kind of like [laughs] how set up this was and it was this woman sitting at a desk eating Crisps a bag of crisps with her feet up And saying ‘I don’t want to go out’ ‘Because the houses smell of piss’. And I thought that is how a lot of people that’s what they think social workers do I know. That image will never leave my mind It will never leave my mind I knew you were going to say that because that is the image that just stays with you That image because I was just watching it and I just thought ‘No, man’ because they couldn’t have set this up they couldn’t have promoted more negative images than this woman, this silhouette, slightly overweight, eating crisps, talking about how people’s houses smell of piss [both laugh] You know ‘I don’t want to do that’. And they are never going to promote that. Because that is what we are to a lot of people.

This co-narrated atrocity story begins with Ed’s statement that ‘you must have seen that documentary’ and my affirmation. Ed assumes that I ‘must’ have seen the show and thus supplies no further details of this documentary. However, I immediately realise that he is referring to a particular documentary about a child protection social work team. This was a Channel 4 documentary called ‘Undercover Social Worker’ (Mathieson 2010) in which a reporter worked covertly in a UK social services department for 3 months. This is another example of the documentary method of interpretation (Garfinkel 1967). Although I had never met Ed before, Ed was aware of my biography as an experienced mental health social worker from our e-mail correspondence arranging the interview and the pre-interview talk in which this was confirmed. Thus, by this indexical use of the word documentary, ‘each party made reference to the biography and prospects of the present interaction which each used and attributed to the other as a common scheme of interpretation and expression’ (Garfinkel 1967: 39). It is also interesting here that we both share the same overriding image from the documentary: a female social worker sitting at her desk eating crisps. Ed and I co-narrate the whole story. Even though we have never met before, we are able to produce a seamless narrative. I complete his first sentence [‘eating . . . crisps’] and Ed then extends the sentence further [‘a bag of crisps with her feet up’]. Next, we co-narrate the reported speech of the social worker, using conjunctives [‘and’ and ‘because’]. Eder (1988) calls this practice conjunction, where one long sentence is made by the use of connecting words. More poetically, Harvey Sacks (1992: 315) described this as ‘latching on’, like ‘a relay race, where two runners come together and the baton is exchanged and one runner continues and the other one stops’. Through these devices we are able to work together to produce a continuous sentence. My statement ‘That image will never leave my mind’ is directly mirrored by Ed’s ‘It will never leave my mind’ and his use of the term ‘That image’ in his next turn. Eder (1988) shows how the repetition of a word or phrase supports or ratifies the previous utterance. Even though Ed is at pains to point out that the documentary was ‘fixed a bit’ and ‘how set up this was’, he acknowledges ‘that is how a lot of people that’s what they think social workers do’. Through this story, then, Ed and I portray the negative image of social work and how social work is represented by the media. This echoes the findings of the final report of the Social Work Task Force (2009: 48) that the ‘public image of the profession seems therefore to © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness

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be unremittingly negative’. In our story, the social worker epitomises this negative perception of social work. As well as co-narration, our competence is also displayed through the use of humour (Morriss 2014b). We both laugh at the extremely negative image of ‘this woman this silhouette, slightly overweight, eating crisps, talking about how people’s houses smell of piss’. This is an example of how gallows (White 2006) and bleak (Pithouse 1998) humour can be used to support identity claims. Thus, although the other in this atrocity story shares the same social work profession, the story still works to reinforce our collective identity as the woman in the documentary is not a real social worker. Indeed, it is notable that she is only referred to as ‘this woman’ (lines 6 and 18) rather than as a social worker. The shared laughter works to demonstrate our affiliation as social work members and our disaffiliation with this woman in the documentary (Stivers 2008). Arguably, my findings further develop Eder’s (1988) conclusion that the girls were able to produce a collaborative narrative because they were a stable peer group who had known each for a long time through being at the same school and members of the same choir. I had never met or spoken to Ed before this interview and our e-mail correspondence was limited to the logistics of arranging the meeting. However, significantly, this e-mail correspondence and the pre-interview talk worked to establish that we shared membership of the social work trade. Prior to all the interview interactions, before the official interview talk commenced, as signalled by pressing ‘play’ on the digital recorder, talk outside the interview interaction had already taken place. Like the interview talk, this talk was asymmetrical but in a directly contrasting way; it was the social workers who asked me the questions. They asked where I have done my social work training, where I had worked, how long I had been a practitioner and why had I decided to do the research. This can be seen as their seeking to establish my credibility for interviewing them by checking that I was a bona fide member of the social work group. Thus, while it was apparent in the extract from the group interview that we were engaged in collaboratively doing an interview, at this point in the individual interview with Ed, it seems to be my social work identity, rather than my (social work) researcher identity, that is being made relevant. Interestingly, in his reply to Wetherell, Schegloff (1998: 415) pointed out that a central feature of the data she presented was that the entire exchange was researcher-prompted; ‘embodied in who asks the questions and who answers them’. Here it is Ed who asks the question that begins this section of the interaction. Moreover, in Wetherell’s article (1998), the interviewer did not share the same identity as the interviewees. Unlike a researcher who has to meet the unique adequacy requirement of methods in the weak sense prior to or during the research process, as a social work member with over 10 years’ post-qualifying experience, I was already a vulgarly competent member. Thus, it is argued that – at this specific point in the interview – it was my vulgar competency as a social work group member rather than my unique adequacy as a researcher that allowed me to artfully accomplish the co-narrated interaction.

Discussion: being a member and atrocity stories The next section discusses the previous work on atrocity stories in relation to the ethnomethodological notion of being a member. In Stimson and Webb’s (1981) study, the atrocity stories were told by the women to each other in group discussions and informal conversation. When Stimson and Webb asked for clarification as interviewers, they described the women as often backing down a little and ‘furnished details which showed the account in less black-and white-terms’ (p. 100). Stimson and Webb concluded that this meant that the patients were originally overdoing the telling. Thus, there was a difference in terms of the stories told to other group members and to the researchers. In the study by Baruch, there is an interesting © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness

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discussion in the notes section. In note 2, Baruch (1981) observed that the atrocity stories often took a truncated form in the formal part of the interview but were then repeated in an elaborate manner during the informal stage. Baruch explained this in terms of the parents’ conception of the interviewer. Baruch (1981) found that offering ‘unreserved criticisms’ was ‘initially problematic’ (p. 294, n.) as the parents saw the researchers as connected to the hospital. However, it ‘soon became apparent that we were sympathetically disposed towards their point of view’ (p.294, n.) and: (F)rom an analysis of the talk, it will be seen that our utterances display us as members who share and affirm our respondents’ everyday ‘reality’. Thus the repetition and elaboration of their stories was in order. (Baruch 1981: 294n) Thus, for Baruch, the atrocity stories were told to them once the parents saw them as members. Furthermore, Dingwall (1977a: 145) argued that atrocity stories ‘play an important part in defining the colleague group, those to whom one can tell such stories and from whom one receives them’. He concluded that: [A]cquiring an appropriate repertoire of such stories and being able to identify appropriate occasions for telling them are important parts of becoming recognized as a competent member of an occupation. (Dingwall 1977b: 29) For Dingwall, it was only the occupational members who could tell such stories and they did so only where most of the audience shared the same group identity. He observed that while the student health visitors would criticise nurses when they were together as a group, they were very reluctant to accept criticism from anyone else or to voice it publically. Dingwall (1977a: 158) noted that in ‘the presence of non-members, like myself, story-telling becomes much more problematic’. Finally, in contrast, the nurses in Allen’s (2001) study told atrocity stories in front of and directly to her. Significantly, Allen (2001: 84) described how she also told atrocity stories ‘of my own to establish rapport with the research participants and present myself as someone who knew “how things really were”’. Crucially here, Allen shared the same professional identity as her nurse participants and so was arguably seen as a group member. Thus, at the times in the interviews when the social workers told atrocity stories, they can be seen as treating me as a social work group member. I was a group member in the sense that Garfinkel (2006: 197) described: ‘If Y treats X as a group member, then X is a group member’. At those times, in ethnomethological terms, we were ‘talking as bona fide professional practitioners about usual demands, usual attainments, and usual practices’ (Garfinkel 1967: 14). This was most apparent in the extract in the individual interview with Ed, where we co-narrated the atrocity story. It must be noted, however, that other identities were made relevant at other times in the interview-as-interaction. In the extract from the group interview, for example, I was positioned as interviewer, report-writer and social work researcher.

Conclusions The aim of the article has been to explore the atrocity stories told by social work AMHPs. In line with previous studies, the stories can be seen as a form of boundary demarcation, distinguishing group members from outsiders. Indeed, it has been argued that being a group member is necessary for atrocity stories to be told. Thus, atrocity stories were told by the social work members of a group interview. In addition, atrocity stories were told in an © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness

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individual interview because I shared the same professional identity as the interviewee. Thus, the findings also relate to previous work on doing research interviews. For example, Abell et al. (2006: 241) found that ‘doing similarity’ through invoking shared experiences can lead to elaborated interview talk and so the ‘identity of the interviewer should be as much a focus of study as that of the interviewee’. As such, my findings concur with Rapley’s (2001: 306) assertion that interviews ‘are spaces of finely co-coordinated interactional work in which the talk of both speakers is central to producing the interview’. The article has also considered the role of co-narration in relation to atrocity stories. In line with Eder’s (1988) findings, as social work colleagues in the same team, the group members were able to co-narrate atrocity stories about health professionals. However, the second extract from the individual interview further develops Eder’s findings. Here two people who had never met before were able to artfully co-narrate an atrocity story. Arguably, this demonstrates the depth of our shared competence in the haecceity of social work. Moreover, this example was unusual as the subject of the story ostensibly shared the same social work identity. However, the practice of atrocity stories to present the ‘occupation members as hero’ (Dingwall 1977b: 30) was maintained through the portrayal of the woman in the documentary as not a real or proper social worker. To conclude, the article contributes to the sociological understanding of the telling of atrocity stories. The use of the ethnomethodologically informed, fine-grained analysis of the empirical data has demonstrated how the telling of atrocity stories can work to accomplish professional identity. The article has extended work on atrocity stories in two key areas. Firstly, the findings show how atrocity stories can be co-narrated by bona fide group members who are vulgarly competent in the haecceity of the profession. This can be achieved in a group interview where the participants are all members of the same profession. Moreover, the telling of co-narrated atrocity stories can also be accomplished in an individual interview where the interviewer and the interviewee share the same professional identity. Secondly, unlike previous work on atrocity stories, the analysis has shown that a member of the same profession can — ostensibly — be the subject of the story. Finally, it is argued that the ethnomethodological concepts of vulgar competency and unique adequacy, as well as the related notions of indexicality and the documentary method of interpretation, are key to understanding the accomplishment of co-narrated atrocity stories. This is not to enter into a debate about what Styles (1979) has called insider and outsider myths; rather, the aim is to demonstrate the different insights that ethnomethodology can offer. As Schegloff (1998: 416) notes, ‘it is worth recognizing that the enterprise is different and the payoffs are likely to be different in kind and in grounding as well’. However, for mental health social workers, the emphasis of detailed analysis of talk is especially relevant as ‘talk and interaction are the backbone of social work’ (Hall et al. 2014: 2). Address for correspondence: Lisa Morriss, 1.11 Simon Building, Institute of Brain, Behaviour and Mental Health, Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, University of Manchester, M13 9PL. E-mail: [email protected]

Acknowledgements The research was funded by a PhD studentship awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council. I am very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who took the time to give me very helpful comments, which greatly improved my article. I am forever indebted to Greg Smith who told me to ‘just write’. Finally, I wish to thank Jadwiga Leigh who has been with me at every step. © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness

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