Co-producing user voices: Making up accounts of experiences of vulnerable service users

Research area: Accounting

 

Abstract: This paper examines how the voice of vulnerable service users is ‘co-produced’ in an internal quality control and reporting team of a social care charity. The paper draws on 24 months of organisational ethnographic research which was aimed at understanding processes of coproducing user voice at a microsociological level. In this paper, co-production refers to both how voice is elicited, yet also framed, in a very specific way, so as to meet the reporting requirements for feedback on the delivery of services. The paper traces different moments of co-producing from the very first encounter between service user and organisational member, to the representing and ‘making up’ of user experience in the finalised reports that are circulated within and outside the organisation in response to regulatory and other demands for accounts of user feedback. It conceptualises co-production as an extended, continuous, and technically mediated process. The process of co-production is one in which the voice of service users is literally co-produced in the interstices between the actual words spoken and the accounting frameworks within which they have to be incorporated. The paper examines the strategies employed to manage the tensions unfolding between ideals of user empowerment, on the one hand, and individual user effacing organisational reporting demands, on the other hand. It explores this curious relationship between user abstraction and individuation, and discusses implications for our understanding of the complex interdependencies of user representation and participation.