ABSTRACT
Welfare workers are understood as an empirical category: it is those who act knowledgeably, competently and are entrusted to manage immigrants and refugees on behalf of the public interest. Welfare workers are understood, underscoring the sociological way of understanding them, as agents who participate in defining the social and cultural membership of the Danish welfare state as a symbolic community, thus making society through their symbolic boundary work. Welfare work is understood and identified analytically as a core symbolic boundary-making and sociation activity of the modern state, in case the Danish welfare state, welfare work being practical and necessary for the government of citizen behaviour and the securing of sociation. Sociological interviews were chosen because they are good for studying classification, boundary work, imagined realities and thought communities. Sociological reflections were carried out during the interview study. Some of the interviewees energised these reflections more than others.
