Introduction

Welfare professions are described in different ways. A common way is to describe them as occupational groups that, on the basis of their specific mandate and their expertise, are considered to be best suited to solve citizens’ problems and meet their needs (Molander and Terum, 2010; Svensson, 2010). However, a basic prerequisite for professionals to be able to solve problems and meet needs is that they clarify who has the problem or who can be considered as a client (Mosesson, 2000). Put differently, professions need to first figure out who is a client, in order to be able to initiate an intervention process that usually begins with diagnosis of the client's problem and generally ends with proposals for treating the problem (Hasenfeld, 1983; Abbott, 1988).

For many professions, the question of who is a client is self-evident or unproblematic. In research on professions and human services organisations it is often taken for granted that the person who pays for or seeks a service provided by professionals may be regarded as a client (Johnson, 1972; Hasenfeld, 1983; Abbott, 1988; Salonen, 2000). For professionals like social workers (SWs), however, this question is not so clear-cut, since a case can be initiated by persons other than the one who has a problem to be solved or a need to be met. More specifically, aside from individual clients, authorities or private individuals also can report to the social services a person who appears to be in need of the SWs intervention (Mosesson, 2000; Salonen, 2000). SWs are therefore often uncertain about who can be seen as a client. This chapter examines whom SWs and GPs view as a client, and how they gather information about the client and think about the client's problem. The data consists of vignette-based focus group interviews with 14 SWs and 11 GPs. The chapter demonstrates that for SWs it is an initial and central element of their professional practice to identify who the client is, while for the GPs it is self-evident that the person who visits them with a problem is a client (the term client refers both to the clients met by SWs and the patients that GPs encounter in their professional practice).