The claim that social workers are taught to become a friend in order to manipulate the
client is highly speculative and rests on the interpretation of social work as state
sponsored surveillance. It is true that social work, unlike nursing, is highly political but
social workers are acutely aware of the possibility of being used as, or of being
perceived as, agents of state control. This goes some way to explain the emphasis on
values in social work education and the articulation of the aim of empowering
disadvantaged individuals and groups in the code of practice for social work (see, for
example, Banks 2001).
These criticisms with which de Raeve takes issue might also be characterised as overly
romanticising the idea of authentic relationships such as those between friends. It is true
that one hopes one’s friends to be one’s friends for more that merely instrumental
reasons but it would seem unreasonable for one’s friends to have no instrumental gains
from the friendship. In addition, it would also seem unreasonable to suppose that one’s
friends do not modify their emotional responses for if one expects one’s friends to
repress their own interests in the interests of friendship it is, perhaps, to demand too
much. Friends do modify their reactions to one another in order to maintain friendships.
If it is to be said that friendships are genuine relationships despite modifications of
emotional responses done for the good of the friendship then there would seem no
reason not to apply the same logic to the nurse-patient relationship. One might therefore
claim that the modifications of responses on the part of the nurse are equally genuine
because those modifications aim at the good of the patient (however defined) and this
would seem, at least priτna facie, authentic. What would be inauthentic would be for a
nurse to modify her or his responses for reasons that have nothing to do with promoting
the well-being of a patient. This would also be to fail to engage with nursing as a
practice as defined in chapter 3.
Personal trust relationships: kinship
For some it is kinship rather than friendship that forms the paradigm case of personal
trust. Fukuyama (1995) describes the cultural determinants of the boundaries of our
trust relations when, for example, he contrasts the tendency of Chinese communities to
consider trust to be limited to family with the European approach of trusting non-
family. He draws on Redding who states “The key feature [of Hong Kong businesses]
would appear to be that you trust your family absolutely, your friends and acquaintances
to the degree that mutual dependence has been established ... With everybody else you
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