Contingent Control and Wild Moments: Conducting Psychiatric Evaluations in the Home

• Robert M. Emerson ^[1] ; Melvin Pollner ^[2]
  1. [1] Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA; E-Mail: remerson@soc.ucla.edu. Corresponding author
  2. [2] Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA; E-Mail: remerson@soc.ucla.edu. Deceased
• Localización: Social Inclusion, ISSN-e 2183-2803, Vol. 7, Nº. 1, 3, 2019 (Ejemplar dedicado a: “Producing People” in Documents and Meetings in Human Service Organizations), págs. 259-268
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • When social control and social service workers go into the field, into the “native habitat” of some problem, a variety of tacit structures and controls that mark office work with its standardized documents and formal meetings are weakened or absent entirely. As a result, compared to office settings, social control work in field settings tends to become open, contingent, unpredictable, and on occasion even wild. This article provides a strategic case study of the distinctive features of social control decision-making in the field, drawing on observations of field work by psychiatric emergency teams (PET) from the 1970s. PET typically went to the homes of psychiatrically-troubled persons in order to conduct evaluations for involuntary mental hospitalization. This article will analyze the varied, situationally-sensitive practices these workers adopted to evaluate such patients in their own homes.