Examining social work with children and youth in welfare service organizations observed as hybrids

This paper seeks to explore social work as it can be observed in the welfare service organizations of Danish municipalities, specifically within the context of social work concerned with the protection of the child at risk. The paper uses the systems theory of Niklas Luh-mann to elaborate and explore how social work within the specific frame of child protection care becomes an actual hybrid (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2012).
The paper recognizes social work as a social system, the system for help in society (Baecker, 1994) (Nissen, 2010). The paper sets out to explore how structural coupling within the welfare system of child protection can be said to emerge into a different form than (maybe) other welfare services. The explorative curiosity rises from recognition of the economic systems expansion and dominant semantics within social services, specifically child protection and how social workers may and may not refer to this as potential conflict using semantics of conflict. Welfare technologies as for instance the law stipulated “child conversation”, budget control and action plans form the preliminary basis of the decision-making process of a social intervention regarding a child, but how do these help-programs interact and are codified within the hands of the social worker, working in the emerging hybrid of child protection care?