Imagined community, social work, metanarrative of good social worker, correctness of social work performance, social and legal protection of children

The imagined community of social workers provides a collective resemblance to the individual construction of the correctness of performance of social work. This paper aims to understand the influence of the imagined community and its shared social worker’s metanarrative on the ‘correctness’ of social work in social and legal protection of children in Czechia. The data were created through a qualitative research strategy, more specifically through sets of three repeated interviews with eight well-experienced social workers from the office of social and legal protection of children. The data were analyzed using the constructivist grounded theory by Charmaz. The research conceived six roles of the imagined community that fulfill specific functions, plus two functions for which the informants did not create any specific roles of imagined community; making these functions in the informants’ view unfulfilled. Specifically, this concerned self-organizing capacity as well as activation and protection of a social worker. The generated data are further discussed in the context of education and training designed for social workers.