Hermeneutic reflections on meetings between citizens and professionals

Institutions are often meeting places for people of different backgrounds and such meetings may also be described as cultural encounters. The differences may be characterised by at times significant discrepancies in ways of thinking and acting between individuals, whom we may broadly categorise as citizens and professionals. These may be meetings between, for instance, patient and medical professional or client and caseworker. Daily institutional practice is able to take such differences into account in a variety of ways, but if the challenge is handled only with a view to pragmatic parameters, then something important is overlooked. Lurking behind any practical problem solution you will often find a range of hidden, yet critical, premises – these can be made visible by means of what is referred to in this article as ‘hermeneutic reflection’. The article thus contributes with a sort of analytical device. The purpose of hermeneutic reflection, however, is not to solve a problem here and now, but rather a long-term way of making the individual conscious of what there is beneath the surface in terms of what characterises meetings between sensible, thinking people. In this article, then, the focus is on such meetings as they occur within institutional frameworks.