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Summary: Post-modern and social construction views of identity creation applied to social work multiprofessional teams are exemplified by palliative care social work. They provide complex understandings that allow for ambiguities in identity creation.Findings: A personal and social self interacting create identity, emerging from social relations. Professional identity thus emerges from the interaction between personal identity and collective professional identities. Ascription of social and professional identities by powerful social groups is resisted, but identities emerge in identity politics among professional groups in social situations. In a client-worker-agency interaction cycle, multiprofessional interactions in communities of practice lead individual professionals to negotiate knowledge to form specialized roles such as palliative care social work. These then influence wider professional identities.Applications: Rather than seeking to maintain established professional identities, workers may more effectively develop their professional identity by negotiating knowledge and demonstrating practice in multiprofessional teams.

• Summary: The impact and role of systems theory in social work is analysed politically. The political analysis explores the social construction of professions and their knowledge and theory bases by understanding how theory is used by and generates groups contending for influence in social work. Systems theory had a major impact on social work in the 1970s and developed in the USA in ecological theory and more broadly as a contribution to networking. • Findings: The analysis of social work writings confirms contextual explanations, that systems theory had an impact as part of wider social changes affecting social work, rather than for intrinsic reasons of theoretical or intellectual development. In the USA, this led to its use as continuity with traditional theoretical concepts; in the UK, as a response to organizational change. Ecological theory continued as a major influence in the USA because it maintained that continuity; systems theory declined in the UK because further organizational changes supplanted it. Networking developed separately, drawing in other theoretical traditions, supplanting systems ideas. Family therapy used similar ideas at the outset, but developed different theoretical traditions. • Applications: The example of systems theory shows how different theoretical traditions and social contexts for the use of knowledge in professions affect theoretical and professional development.

Summary: The conception of a knowledge base for social work is explored within a multinational/multicultural context. Findings: Flaws in the idea of a knowledge base include the conception that social science knowledge is being continually reconstructed rather than acting as a base, the impossibility of defining a separable body of knowledge and the difficulty of seeing some knowledge as basic to all social work practice. Four arenas of debate within social work where the concept is particularly used are in defining the processes of professionalization, defining training and education curricula, identifying what knowledge is useful in practice and defining professional roles within multidisciplinary teams. Study of the construction and politics of knowledge biases within social work, through examination of the use of knowledge in practice and through consideration of the influence of stakeholders in creating biases, permits understanding of social work knowledge as a continuing interactive process among practitioners and other stakeholders rather than as an established base. Applications: Knowledge in any particular country or specialization of social work may be seen as biases within a broader conception of knowledge.