Boundaries of social work or social work of boundaries? The Social Service Review lecture

In this article, I sketch three successive conceptions of social work as a profession. The first takes a functionalist approach-social work as the profession of interstitiality. Difficulties in this view lead to a second, ecological approach. Here social work is a complex defended turf in the system of professions. Explaining the origins of this turf requires a network-constitutive approach, in which social work arises out of a set of social ''boundary groups'' capable of assembly into such a defensible turf. These three views capture different aspects of the profession, as well as different times in its development. I close with some speculations about the future of the profession.