‘Changing the rules of the game’: Communication and power in digital relationships in child welfare services

Abstract The practitioner–client relationship is central to social work and incorporates explicit and tacit elements. Through digitalization, interactions have shifted to platforms imposing new languages and communicative tools. This article explores how Computer Mediated Technology (CMT) has influenced typical power asymmetries in social workers’ and clients’ interactions in child welfare services. To explore these questions, we carried out 20 interviews, using multiple perspective interviews, with practitioners, parents and children, in Italy. The data were thematically analysed under the theoretical frame of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis and the mechanisms of preserving or negotiating power. Findings indicate three main impacts of the use of CMT: blurring of the institutional spaces; challenging the professional agenda; and changing role representations. Data also give information on how social workers react to what emerged as critical incidents: re-establishing their power or opening negotiations. We argue that CMTs and related incidents, linked to challenging and resisting power asymmetries, could be considered as requests for a rebalancing of power from clients, leading to more democratic communication where utterances and disturbances signal a need to change the rules of the game. In child welfare services, marked by the intersection of different power asymmetries, this focus becomes all the more relevant.