ABSTRACT
Social work and policy research have long focused on the issue of clientization within the professional setting (Prottas 1979, Lipsky 1980). Villadsen (2012, p. 67) notes how “social work construes a series of specific aspects of the client as objective problems that demand treatment, elimination, or keeping in check.” This clientization, he suggests, reflects a “paradox of universality” (p. 68), in which social work professionals are encouraged to meet the user as a unique individual and yet must also structure interactions with the user according to the standardized categories that make up the procedures and rationales of the welfare state. Clientization is a general process of turning people into clients suitable for the application of human services. Putting this simply, service institutions and providers construct the clients they need for doing their work. Clientization is described as unfolding in relation to national policy, to the institutional sphere in which it occurs, and to the preferences of local service agents. The process of clientization has been critiqued for moving clients from active, autonomous “subjects” to categorized “objects” (Skau 1992, as cited in Madsen 2008).
