Staging change and normality: Support and treatment organisations on social media

In social media presentations, welfare organisations can market themselves and convey information to prospective end-users and other external actors.

By analysing organisations’ Instagram-images, and qualitative interviews with organisation representatives, case managers, and end-users, this study aims to examine such presentations of residential care for children and youth, residential treatment of drug and alcohol addiction for adults, and group homes for persons with certain impairments, and how such presentation practices come into use in the relation between different groups of actors in the organisational context.

The presentations function as shop window arrangements, designed to correspond to the perceived demands of the intended audience, whereby the organisations gain legitimacy and attract customers on a welfare market.

These ‘presentation practices’ should be understood in the context of a new direction in Swedish social work, where individuals are given the responsibility to identify their own needs and contact care providers.

Presentations are likely to be used as information when users choose between providers, and also affect perceptions about these places and their services.

There is a need to empirically examine how social media functions as impression management and marketing towards external groups, particularly as these organisations are characterised by limited transparency.

Furthermore, the study investigates what happens in the residential care context is staged in order to convey attractive messages.

Should presentations practices mean that external groups are constructed as legitimate stakeholders and care is adjusted to meet their needs, user rights as well as professional integrity is at stake.Results may be used to develop guidelines for how residential care organisations should use social media, and recommendations for how case managers can relate to the messages conveyed in the presentations.