Socialsekreteraren genom andras ögon - poliser, lärare och psykologer om socialtjänsten

The aim of this study was to examine how social workers are described by actors of other professions’ who regularly cooperate with social workers. Social work with children is an area that involves several professions. The questions we intended to look at were: How do these actors describe and view the social worker and his or her work? How do other professions look at their collaborations with social child care? The data consists of ten in-depth interviews with interviewees of three different occupations – policemen (4), teachers (4) and psychologists (2). Our requirement has been that everyone we interviewed should have had a longer experience with working collaborative with social services. In our analysis have we mainly focused on our interviewees’ experiences and knowledge regarding cooperate with social child care. The concepts of street-level bureaucracy and social closure served as analytical tools. The results point to the importance of trust and understanding in between the public authorities – not only between the individual street-level bureaucrats – for fruitful cooperation to happen. The key to fruitful cooperation (characterized by trust and respect), according to our interviewees, is long-term cooperation. Thus, there might be a “vicious circle” embedded in efforts to enhance cooperation; when the benefits of cooperation are not immediately evident, cooperation might be experienced as worthless, bureaucratic and/or ineffective