Written by Ivan Harsløf, Simon Innvær, Dag Jenssen, Wenche Bekken and Ingo Bode

In today’s welfare states, human needs no longer fit neatly within sectoral boxes. As lives become more complex, so too does the map of service provision. From healthcare to education, migration to criminal justice, the demand for ‘joined-up’ solutions have become a mantra. And in the middle of this complexity, we increasingly find social workers.

In Hybrid Social Work: Contested Knowledge, Fragile Collaboration and Social Citizenship, published by Edward Elgar, we explore the social workers that confront other professionals and logics in their work settings, often outside their traditional strongholds – being embedded instead in hospitals, prisons, or schools. We call this hybrid social work. This is not new. From its outset, social workers have worked out of host settings and collaborated with others. But as institutions and professions become increasingly specialized – just think of the accelerated turnover in modern hospitals – their role becomes both more challenging and more important.

In settings where social work is not the dominant profession, professionals must adjust to logics not their own, adapt their methods, learn new field-specific skills, and sometimes justify their presence. Whether in a hospital ward where biomedical discourse takes centre stage, or in a correctional facility dominated by security concerns, these practitioners operate at the boundary of professional worlds. Their work is deeply relational, but also epistemic: it is not only what they do that matters, but also how their knowledge is perceived – or ignored.

A new role with old tensions

Social work has always balanced conflicting aims: care and control, advocacy and administration, empowerment and enforcement. But as services diversify and fragment, hybridization becomes institutionalized in new ways. It is no longer an occasional friction at the edge of the profession, but increasingly the norm.

Social work comes with tensions and often deals with wicked problems. In some cases, social workers must implement policies they disagree with. In others, they are marginalised by dominant professions or organizational logics alien to their culture. Their work may be welcomed, misunderstood, or actively resisted. Hybrid social work, then, is not just a pragmatic arrangement – it is a contested terrain. When different logics meet, the social workers sometimes deal with contested terrains by using their discretionary skills to integrate with, segregate from, or assimilate into competing logics.

Drawing on case studies from Scandinavia, Belgium, Germany, France, Australia, USA, and beyond, the book explores these tensions across a range of welfare contexts. In many instances, what social workers contribute is an understanding of and interest in the broader social circumstances individuals find themselves in. Engaging with these social circumstances requires what a chapter in the book calls system knowledge: an awareness of how politics, law, and organizational structures shape the possibilities for action.

In the accounts of interviewed social workers, we see a form of professional agency that is both constrained and inventive. For example, a social worker in a child protection office, facing rising and increasingly complex caseloads, described how understanding the organizational impact of an upcoming national reform enabled her to make sense of what caused the changing demads, mobilize allies, and influence local strategies to slightly curb its local impact. Another, working in a school, saw the classroom as a democratic space and challenged individualizing labels while promoting a more structural understanding among staff.

These stories suggest that hybrid social work is not passive implementation of policy, nor simply ‘add-ons’ to existing services. Social workers are, at their best, mediators of trust and translators of complexity – able to bring together different sectors, logics and forms of knowledge in service of the people they work with. Sometimes, they may also feel impeded to do so which sets their role under strain.

Knowledge as a battleground

A central theme running through the book is that hybrid social work is not just about tasks – it is also about knowledge. What counts as valid knowledge in human services? Whose expertise is recognized? And what does happen when social work knowledge competes with biomedical, legal, or managerial discourses?

In several settings studied in the book, social workers reported that their insights – rooted in life context, ethics, and long-term support – were seen as ‘soft’ or secondary to the technical expertise of other professions. In Australian healthcare, as outlined in one of the chapters, social workers are routinely sidelined in clinical teams, even when their assessments provided crucial contextual understanding of a patient’s situation. The book identifies this as a form of epistemic injustice – when knowledge rooted in lived experience, community engagement or holistic care is systematically devalued.

But there are also examples where social workers succeed in altering the epistemic culture of their organizations. Through persistence, credibility, and strategic alliances, some manage to embed social perspectives in otherwise technocratic environments. In doing so, they not only improve service delivery – they also create room for putting questions of social citizenship on the agenda.

Beyond the team: The politics of hybrid work

Hybrid social work also raises questions about power. In fragmented service systems, collaboration across organisations and professions is both vital and difficult. The book shows that respective teamwork often falls short of its promise. Rather than shared responsibility, we often see asymmetric playing fields where one profession sets the agenda and others follow. In this context, the social worker’s generalist role may be seen as vague or expendable. 

Yet this ‘vagueness’ is also a strength. It allows social workers to see connections others miss, to think beyond narrow mandates, and to challenge reductionist logics. To make the most of this potential, the book proposes two key steps. First, social work education must prioritise social science training, equipping practitioners with a deeper understanding of organisational frameworks, policymaking, and sociological processes. This knowledge enables social workers to engage with increasingly complex systems and advocate for change where needed. Second, social workers should be encouraged to develop greater assertiveness through targeted professional development. Social workers contribute immensely to the value creation in human service organizations, whether enabling a hospital patient to focus on recovery by resolving income issues or strengthening the broader social cohesion in schools. Unfortunately, this contribution often goes unseen or unmeasured. When social workers understand and convey their worth, they can more strongly influence service provision.

A concept for our times

Ultimately, the concept of hybrid social work is not just a description of current practice. It is also an invitation to rethink how we train, support and evaluate social workers in complex settings, how we recognize the political and epistemic labour involved in their work, and how to see them not just as service providers, but as critical actors in the making of more responsive welfare institutions.

Hybrid social work is not always easy. It is often frustrating, under-recognised, and messy. But it is also where some of the most important and innovative practices are taking place today. By exploring this terrain, the book hopes to open up new debates – among scholars, practitioners, educators and policymakers alike – about what social work can be, and what it must become.

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