Open Access

What constitutes social work is a central question in theory building. If social work wants to be more than a model idea, we cannot answer this question without looking at social work practice. The article presents ‘doing social work’ as an approach to theorising social work through ethnographic research. In addition to the basic theoretical and methodological characteristics of the approach, we present four modes of doing social work, which have been developed based on a comparison of different ethnographic studies in different fields: deciding in uncertainty; playing with ambiguity; using categories of difference; and disciplining the everyday. In the following, the mode of playing with ambiguity will be singled out and presented in detail, as it has an important impact on doing relationship while doing social work. In the article, we will use ethnographic data and examples to show how actors actively deal with different roles without making this explicit.