Discoveries-through-Prose Nobody home: a parallel process investigation of a child welfare agency

Abstract

During action research related to the persistent burnout of social workers in a child welfare agency, I discovered that members regularly referred to how the agency was “just like” client families. I explore the possibility that the likeness between the two social systems was not simply coincidental but reflected a parallel process by which client family issues were unconsciously “absorbed” into the agency. Parallel processes related to individuals and groups have been noted anecdotally but have not been examined in organization-environment relations. I collected and analyzed data to uncover key parallels and infer the absorption processes by which they were created. I discuss those parallels as agency reenactments of key client family dynamics—of disconnection, abuse, neglect—and note individual and collective collusions that maintain those dynamics. I thus show how what happened in the agency to enable persistent social worker burnout was intimately related to what happened to the agency at its boundary with key aspects of its environment. This realization expands possibilities for scholars to take seriously the subterranean flow of emotions across organizational-environment boundaries that shape the absorptive capacity of organizations.