In 1991 Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger reformulated traditional approaches to professional knowledge, saying that rather than being a set of concepts that one learns formally, professional knowledge is situated in a ‘community of practice’. To function, as well as generating a shared repertoire of ideas, such communities of practice develop a set of commitments and memories and produce routines, vocabulary and symbols that in some way carry the accumulated knowledge of that community. Although Lave and Wenger (1991) saw this as a positive characteristic of professions, Ivan Illich (1977) saw it rather differently, claiming that professions create a set of needs in others that can only be met by that profession. According to Illich, the profession produces a self-justifying narrative, vocabulary and collective memory that rarefies its knowledge, reinscribes its own position, and ultimately disables those it claims to serve. As a form of shorthand, we have called these narratives tales.

As we explored in Chapter Three, one of the dangers of participatory research is that these professional tales are simply reproduced. This is why we used critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2001) to interrogate them. In this chapter we present our analysis of just three. First, we explore the primacy workers placed on their ‘relationship’ with young people. We felt there was insufficient articulation of what this means in the context of youth workers responding to violence. Using our psychosocial theoretical frame, we highlight the possible shortcomings that arise within relationships as a result of over-identification and lack of reflexivity on the part of workers. We then look at two particular terms (trust and respect) that recurred in our discourse analysis and the meaning of which we felt needed to be contested and clarified. Finally, we paint a picture of organisational defensiveness in relation towards other agencies working with young people, which has the potential to become part of a self-justifying narrative for youth workers.

Critically engaging with the nature of relationships

The most commonly cited word in our data analysis was ‘relationship’. Youth workers have long argued that the primary vehicle for behavioural change is the relationship between young person and youth worker (Jeffs and Smith, 1988, p 55). In different ways, all of the practitioners cited it as key to their approach.