The book offers explanations and clarifications for the bewildering variety of titles and job profiles in the social professions in Europe. It presents them both as a product of specific national welfare arrangements and as a sign of a special kind of professional autonomy that so far helped to correct national welfare trends. Now this autonomy is once more called for in the light of the complete re-structuring of all European welfare states and a European model of social work could deliver impulses for real alternatives to growing exclusion and inequality.