For me, the most important aspect of this book is that it contextualises service user research, experiential knowledge and autoethnography. It also moves the narrative of service user experience and involvement forward, interrogating how identity shapes knowledge production. This knowledge may be used sensitively and with moral intent, promoting greater understanding, fairer distribution of resources and service user empowerment (Beresford and Evans, 1999). Silencing and social exclusion are addressed by several of the writers – by Middleton (Chapter Two) and Carr (Chapter Ten), in particular – leading to an impoverishment of knowledge (Beresford and Boxall, Chapter Six; Lewis, Chapter Seven; Staddon, Chapter Eight). Systematic investigation of our own knowledge, as Sweeney (Chapter One) has said, offers the opportunity of addressing the ‘politics of recognition’ and social injustice described by Lewis in Chapter Seven.

At the same time, we must ensure that we do not bring some of the prejudices and learnt behaviours of an unjust society with us (Pollard and Evans, Chapter Four), whether these involve racism, homophobia or simply a lust for power (Staddon, 2012, pp 8–9). This is a trap into which service users and service user researchers may also fall. We have emerged from a society that has dealt us prejudice and injustice, but we are still creatures of that society (Goffman, 1971 [1959]) and may bring with us new power structures and ‘iron cages’ (Courpasson and Clegg, 2006), an outcome sometimes seen as inevitable (Dahl, 1971) and even sometimes as having ‘unexpected validity’ (Courpasson, 2004, p 335).

A further danger is that existing power structures will be boosted by some kinds of service user research involvement, a possibility considered in this book by Lewis (Chapter Seven) and elsewhere by Beresford and Boxall (2012). Our participation and involvement depends for its effectiveness on a recognition of imbalances of power, and of the need to engage collaboratively and interactively with ‘involvement policies’ (Lewis, Chapter Seven). Further difficulties for the development of social perspectives in research are present when service users are viewed as having brought their situation upon themselves, as in the case of alcohol and drug users (and perhaps, in the future, victims of climbing accidents, eating disorders, etc, endlessly onwards).