Clients’ first names in social work encounters: maintaining and mitigating asymmetry in institutional interaction

In encounters between social workers and clients, social workers occasionally address clients by their first name, while clients more rarely use social workers’ names. In this article, we examine uses of clients’ first names in social work encounters set in public employment services. Drawing on conversation analytic findings and methods, we focus particularly on the sequential environment surrounding the use of clients’ names to discuss their role in the interaction. The article offers new contributions in two main respects: one is to the field of social work by exploring in detail how a recurrent practice such as the use of clients’ first names is involved in the production and maintenance of institutional roles and in managing power and asymmetry in the client–worker relationship. The second is that the analyses demonstrate how first name address terms are involved in performing context-specific functions in encounters between social workers and clients in a welfare-to-work setting.