Abstrakt

This article discusses conditions of professional social work in public organizations, especially from the perspective of the Nordic countries. We propose that public arenas for social work consist of three domains with different functions and logics, yet interconnected and interdependent. These domains are the domain of politics, the domain of management and administration, and the domain of professional practice. The individual local organizations – made up of these domains with their respective logics – are in turn conditioned by a fourth domain, the domain of institutional conditions. This latter domain contains ideals of control, norms, and views of knowledge and technologies that exist in society, that are legitimized and disseminated by central institutions, and that govern important aspects of how the individual local organizations work. The purpose of this work is to contribute to the development of a domain theory for the organization of social work in the public sector.