This thesis investigates what can be gained by approaching social work reports and conversations as narratives. A conventional approach to social work accounting practices is to treat such documents as (more or less) accurate descriptions of social workers' clients, their problems and proposed remedies. Such a realist approach was found to be flawed, since it assumes straightforward access from accounts to external reality, not considering the constructedness of such documents. Drawing on theoretical themes from the sociology of scientific knowledge, literary theory, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics, this thesis explores the construction and reception of social work accounts as rhetorical, narrative and interactional processes. The documents analysed represent some of the occasions on which social workers describe and recommend social work intervention with children and their families - research interviews, court reports, internal memos, case file entries and journal reports. On these occasions, social work is performed and displayed in descriptions of people and their attributes, justifications for social work intervention and excuses for lack of success. The main theme of the thesis is that social work accounts can profitably be analysed as stories. To explain their work and their clients' world to a variety of audiences, social workers are heard to tell competent, professionally persuasive stories. A variety of storytelling features are explored, looking in particular at plot, character, the construction of the reader and the authority of the writer. Stories are heard to vary with reading occasions and critical audiences, and it is the study of reading relations which is a main focus of the analysis - to whom are these accounts addressed and how are they available to be read? Rhetorical features are investigated in order to understand how social work accounts are made available to be read as morally and factually persuasive. A critical reading is also offered, which questions the adequacy of the accounts, and makes available the possibility of reading unheard stories. Reflexive interludes comment on the claims of the thesis writer in terms of the efforts of the social work writer. The implications of this study are that treating social work accounts as textual accomplishments undermines social workers' claims for reporting objectively about their clients and their problems. Social work can be seen as constituted in and through the performance and reception of stories: doing competent social work is achieved through telling competent social work stories.

Ces dix dernières années, l'étude des réseaux petits-mondes a montré une grande stabilité de certaines métriques issues de la théorie des graphes formels. Elle porte sur l'analyse de réseaux traduisant des activités de l'homme : réseaux d'échanges téléphoniques, de connexions aériennes, de navigation sur le Web, de structure des lexiques linguistiques, mais également de réseaux de diffusion des épidémies ou de réseaux de relations sociales. En revanche, peu d'études ont porté sur l'analyse de la dynamique de ces graphes et leur évolution au cours du temps. C'est cette approche que nous développons dans ce document. Nous nous intéressons ici à des graphes obtenus à partir de comptes rendus professionnels de travailleurs sociaux. Ces graphes modélisent les cooccurrences des mots au sein des phrases. Notre analyse porte sur un lexique professionnel et sur l'évolution de son usage sur une période de près de 40 ans. Après avoir constitué notre matériel à partir des textes écrits (environ 1500 pages dactylographiées), ce corpus d'étude a été quantifié, vérifié, homogénéisé et traité orthographiquement sur un mode semi-automatique. Puis ce corpus normalisé a donné lieu à la constitution d'un graphe global pour la période complète, et d'une quarantaine de graphes pour chacune des sous-périodes étudiées. C'est sur ceux-ci que porte l'analyse de la dynamique d'évolution de graphe issu d'un lexique professionnel. Au final, notre travail permet de pointer le paradoxe existant, entre d'une part la contrainte d'écriture liée à un objet qui ne change que très peu dans la nature de sa mission (le travail d'un éducateur de rue) et d'autre part la permissivité du langage oral qui ne cesse d'évoluer (le langage professionnel). Par ailleurs notre approche propose une certaine automatisation pour dégager l'essentiel d'un "dire professionnel" dans un corpus de comptes rendus. / These last ten years, the study of small-world networks indicated a great stability of certain metrics from the theory of informal graphs. It is about the analysis of networks illustrating man's activities : networks of phone conversations, air connections, web browsing, linguistic vocabularies structure, but also epidemics' spreading or social relations networks. However, few studies focused on the analysis of these graphs' dynamics and their evolution over time. It is this approach that we develop in this document. We will take an interest in graphs obtained from professional reports of social workers. These graphs model the cooccurrences of words within sentences. Our analysis focuses on a professional vocabulary and on the evolution of its use in a period of time of almost 40 years. After our material was produced out of written texts (around 1500 typewritten pages), this corpus of studies has been quantified, checked, homogenized and orthographically dealt with on a semi-automatic mode. Then, this normalized corpus led to the formation of a global graph for the entire period, and of around forty graphs for each of the subperiod under study. Thus the analysis of graphs dynamics changes focuses on a professional vocabulary. Finally, our work enables us to highlight the existing paradox, on one hand, between the writing obligation linked to an object which only changes a tiny bit in the nature of its mission (the work of a street educator), and on the other hand, the permissiveness of oral language that keeps evolving/changing (the professional language). Besides, our approach suggests a certain automation to release the crux of a “ professional saying” in a report's corpus.