This presentation focuses on the processes of inter-professional collaboration between social workers and teachers working in a resource school for children in need of special educational support and who are also the subjects of social services interventions. The resource school is jointly financed and jointly managed by school authorities and social services. The school has ten pupil places and employs five teachers and five social workers. The qualitative data presented here derive from a recently completed PhD study on inter-professional collaboration. Research on inter-professional collaboration is commonly characterised by questions in relation to factors that promote or hinder collaboration (Huxham & Vangen, 2005; San Martín-Rodríguez, Beaulieu, D'Amour & Ferrada-Videla, 2005). This presentation however concerns instead the collaborative relationship between the two different professional groups. The point of departure is in research questions that concern the division of labour among co-collaborating professionals, how different working tasks are distributed and what explicit notions and implicit assumptions underpin such a distribution. In particular, focus is directed on the maintenance and development of professional identities in a close collaborative context, professional legitimacy and the ways in which organisational conditions influence the distribution of and assumptions of responsibility for different working tasks. The analytical tools used stem from theories concerning professions and human services organisations and include concepts such as jurisdiction, boundary work, discretion and negotiation (see Abbott, 1988; Gieryn, 1999; Hasenfeld, 2010; Strauss, 1977). Taking the first of these, professional jurisdiction signifies the exclusive right or monopoly of legitimate activity within a particular field (Abbott, 1988). Abbott argues that, in claiming jurisdiction, a profession is demanding that society recognises its cognitive structure by granting an exclusive right or monopoly of practice in a particular sphere. Secondly, boundary work can be seen as a means of social control of the professional domain that the profession claims to possess (Gieryn, 1999). Boundary work is a term that is used to describe how professionals construct boundaries, the purpose of which is to separate “us” from “them”. Thirdly, according to The ChambersDictionary, discretion involves the “liberty or power of deciding according to one’s own judgement or discernment”. Discretion is thus never an abstract or disembodied exercise of judgement or discernment, but is always contextualised in the sense that it is embedded within a framework of constraints. Dworkin (1977) for example, uses the metaphor of a doughnut to explain how judgement and discernment are enclosed by outer boundaries that cannot be transgressed. Discretion, he explains, is “like the hole in a doughnut [and] does not exist except as an area left open by a surrounding belt of restriction”. Fourthly, according to Strauss (1978) negotiation is “one of the possible means of getting things accomplished when parties need to deal with each other to get those things done”.

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