ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the increasing push towards inter-professional collaboration might impact on professional identity in social work, using the recently created interdisciplinary Swiss child and adult protection authorities or courts as an example and field of observation. It gives brief description of the child and adult protection field in Switzerland in order to enable readers to adequately grasp the practitioners' situation. The chapter discusses basic theoretical concepts which have currency in the literature on professional identity and allow for identifying the dimensions of empirical observation. In recent years, inter-professional collaboration has increasingly attracted attention, especially in the field of health and social care. Professionalization and boundary work have been situated, so far, as collective processes of a profession's development. Twenty-six different cantonal legislations offer as many different organizational frames that have an important impact on collaboration and identity construction of the involved individuals as well as professional groups.
