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General practitioners (GPs) and social workers (SWs) are professions whose professional autonomy and discretion have changed in the so-called risk and audit society. The aim of this article is to compare GPs’ and SWs’ responses to Evidence-Based and Organizational Risk Reduction Technologies (ERRT and ORRT). It is based on a content analysis of 54 peer-reviewed empirical articles. The results show that both professions held ambivalent positions towards ERRT. The response towards ORRT differed in that GPs were sceptical whilst SWs took a more pragmatic view. Furthermore the results suggest that SWs might experience professional benefits by adopting an adherent approach to the increased dis-semination of risk reduction technologies (RRT). GPs, however, did not seem to experience such benefits.

Summary: This article presents a description and analysis of the written narratives of problematic situations given by social workers and general practitioners (GPs) within the framework of the sociology of professions and organisations. The narratives were collected from 28 social workers and 24 GPs, working in several Swedish counties.

Findings: Our findings show that the professionals rarely described lack of knowledge or difficulties choosing the right intervention or treatment as problematic. Rather, the problematic situations contained encounters with clients perceived as disruptive to professional routine practice. We conclude that there were three different types of problematic situations where the professional routine practice was disrupted: (1) Situations related to ‘client-making work’, where the professionals perceived it difficult to, e.g., gather enough information about the client to make a diagnosis, set a timetable or decide on adequate interventions; (2) Situations related to ‘wicked work’, where the professionals experienced clients unable to articulate their problems or understand and follow the interventions suggested by the professionals; (3) Situations related to ‘dirty work’ were only present in GPs’ narratives and typically occurred when GPs perceived that they were dealing with clients who endangered their profes- sional status. 

Applications: Contrary to previous studies, this study indicates that problematic situ- ations are not necessarily connected with traits and characteristic of the client or a lack of professional competence. Instead, they might be connected to situations where professional routine practice is disrupted. Furthermore, it is questionable to what extent problematic situations connected to such disruption can be managed by evi- dence-based methods, manualisation and standardisation. 

This study aims to describe and analyze written accounts of non-problem- atic situations by 28 social workers and 24 general practitioners (GPs). The results show that non-problematic situations were connected to professionals’ control of the intervention process. Non-problematic situations were described by social workers as situations where they had control of the relationship with the client either by the use of coercive means or by the client’s active cooperation. GPs referred to non- problematic situations as situations where they had control of the intervention pro- cess mainly by the use of professional knowledge. One main conclusion is that the ability to control the intervention process through control of the relationship with the client may be of significance to those professions where a central part of the profes- sional jurisdiction involves changing clients’ behaviors. This conclusion means that professional knowledge is not the only way to control the professional intervention process.