Social Work: A Problem-Oriented Introduction

In many regions of the world the twenty-first century has started with a structure of endless challenges for social work. Social work seems to be in demand almost everywhere, from support schemes for children and young people into adulthood and on to support for elderly people, in community work in cities and rural regions, in disaster relief and in care for refugees. This book describes the field of social work – its themes, problems and methods – in the face of the concept of the second, reflexive modernisation. The question needs to be asked of how, and whether, social work’s success story from the first modernity can continue. We discuss the second modernity as a time of blurring boundaries. Today, it frequently faces the problem that the organised terms of its approaches come up against a social reality where the frameworks of social life are becoming dynamic. Normalised structures are dissolving or becoming mixed with new ones; boundaries are blurring and new ones appearing.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schröer (University of Hildesheim); Prof. Dr. Lothar Böhnisch (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)