"Making Up User Voice"

Making Up User Voice

How can we analyse, problematise and theorise the processes and practices involved in eliciting, assembling, and representing “user voice” within organisations delivering health, care and other social services? Drawing on Hacking’s dynamic nominalism and Hacking’s later engagement with Goffman, we investigate how user voice is made up in the interstices between locally situated lived individual experiences of service users and the wider categories of professional and regulatory discourses of care and service quality that seek to account for these. We problematize and theorize the making up of user voice as a situated practice where user voice has no prior ontological status or coherence but is rather a socially and relationally constructed object.  We develop the notions of tracing, framing, and connecting as theoretical coordinates to get to grips with the different dimensions of producing user voice and explore the struggles and dilemmas involved in making abstract classifications of user experience work in practice.

Andrea Mennicken
Associate Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science