How chairs use the pronoun ‘we’ to guide participation in rehabilitation team meetings

Abstract

The chapter examines rehabilitation team meetings in Danish employment services and approaches the data as critical examples of the challenge of collaborative and integrative practice. It foregrounds the concepts of the inclusive and exclusive ‘we’ as linguistic devices used to denote responsibility and authority. It demonstrates how chairs use the pronoun ‘we’, to examine how other team members and/or the service user are included in or excluded from decision making. The core finding is that, in terms of both service user participation and interprofessional collaboration, chairs’ use of ‘we’ works to place ‘the team’ in a position of authority.