Abstract
In Youth Work, Naomi Nichols seamlessly combines theoretical explorations with community-based research. Nichols spent more than a year both researching and participating in emergency youth homeless services; what began as an investigation of how youth “fall through the cracks” of social service provisions culminates in a book that articulately and responsibly weaves applied social justice work with an ethnography of institutional relations. By focusing on the institutions and hierarchies of power relations that youth must navigate in order to receive care, Nichols reveals the complex relationship between inter-organizational processes and coordination of services for homeless youth. Many of the youth that Nichols interacts with do not emerge from their time with social-service institutions as traditional “success stories”; indeed, the lives investigated in the ethnography illuminate the ways in which institutional services often fail the youth that they are meant to serve. Drawing on Foucault’s notions of governmentality and Arendt’s concept of politics as activity, Nichols demonstrates how neoliberalism in the public-service sector constructs practices meant to legitimate practitioner and service accountability to the detriment of immediate care for homeless youth.
The first chapter describes the methodology and framework of Nichols’ institutional ethnography, and Chapters Two through Four delve into the “institutional cracks” that youth encounter through detailed and thoughtfully interpreted narrative accounts. The first half of the book presents the lives and narratives of featured youth, and the second half expands to broader analyses of practitioners and theoretically driven reflections on governance and practice. Chapter Five features the institutional work of numerous practitioners in the field of youth services, and the ending chapters offer recommendations for the intricate connection between community-based research and the development of service programs.
To summarize, Nichols’ Youth Work offers a glimpse into two aspects of sociological inquiry: ethnographic community-based research with real-world practicality. To this end, Youth Work can serve many purposes for a broad array of readers. Practitioners in the field of social service provisions can gain insight into Nichols’ development of new institutional practices and programs; while scholars of sociology, public policy, youth, education, and social work can find inspiration and useful tactics for uniting reflexive community-based research with theory.