Abstract
With the development of social welfare system in Taiwan, the government gradually has institutionalized the protection of persons with disabilities. Paralleled such institutionalization, however, value conflicts among practice appear. This dissertation attempt to inquire: what are the values behind the institution of disabled persons protection? What are the symbolic conflicts evoked among the work of protection? How can an institution work with such conflicts and what are the mechanisms of reconciliation? By focusing on and gathering materials through the everyday work experience of social workers, this research deploy mixed-methods approach consisted of document analysis, participant observation, and in-depth interviews. In chapter 2, I exposed the historical variation of the image of disability behind the emergence of the protection services for people with disabilities. More importantly, due to the fact that there were always specific values or cultural prejudice carried and imposed by the law and institution of protection services, symbolic conflicts and difficulties often occur in the practice of such services. In chapter 3, my analysis turned to and focused on the micro level. The gap or symbolic conflicts between institution and laity were partly and possibly reconciled by social workers’ “symbolic labor”, which is what I called “moral evaluations and the flexibility of discretion”. The appearance of the symbolic labor was on account of the fact that social workers consider the social impact or the harm to clients’ families, which was hardly taken into account by the institutional viewpoint. Finally, I evaluated the symbolic effect of such symbolic labor, and hence investigated whether the arbitrary values were reproduced or not. In chapter 4, I examined symbolic domination in different dimensions. There were some professional views about what ideal protection service should be. Those professional emphasized issues differing from social workers’ “symbolic labor”, but attempted to guide and supervise social workers in their everyday work. In order to meet the supervision and maintain the real operation of protection service simultaneously, social workers have to keep on their symbolic labor in their daily experience on the one hand, but repress or modify their experience to fit in the view of supervision on the other. Furthermore, even at the local level, social workers would face various kinds of challenges from other organizations. These challenges also limited the space of social workers’ discretion. Lastly, in chapter 5, I provided the summery of my findings and offered some reflections on the theme such as “symbolic dominance”, “Institutional Ethnography”, and “Anthropology of Law”.