Social Work as Knowledge Work: Knowledge practices and multi-professional collaboration Pasi Pohjola, Satu Korhonen National Institute for Health and Welfare Finland Introduction This paper discusses two issues relevant to the current day social work: (i.) social work as knowledge work, where various forms of creating and using knowledge are a relevant part of the work, and (ii.) multi-professional collaboration, where social work is integrated into or cooperates with other public services in social and health sector. The aims of this paper are to introduce knowledge practices as a theoretical concept suitable for analyzing these forms of social work listed above and apply this approach for analyzing a number of cases of novel services of multi- professional nature, where social work is a central part of the practice. The theoretical background of this paper is in one form of practice research. The contemporary practice turn and practice research in general have been topics of growing interest in research on social work. The approach here introduces knowledge practices as a central theoretical concept for analyzing multi-professional and knowledge intensive social work. Although the conception of knowledge practice has been used in various forms in social theory, the perspective to knowledge practices in this paper follows the way it is discussed by Karin Knorr-Cetina (2001, 2007). It is argued here that there are two central reasons for introducing knowledge practices as a specific type of practices: First, some of the current practice turn theories are unsuccessful in making sense how practices change (Miettinen et al. 2012). Second, the traditional concepts of practice fit rather poorly to the dynamic nature of knowledge intensive work. According to Knorr-Cetina, central characteristic of knowledge work is the open-ended nature of objects of work, which requires the constant re-evaluation and reassessment of the practices of work. After discussing this theoretical approach, a number of recently developed Finnish cases of service practices are analyzed and the results of these analyses are discussed. The first analysis of these cases consists of a qualitative content analysis of the conceptual models of the selected service practices. These conceptual models of the service practices are developed with a REA-tool, a conceptual tool for modeling practices. This analysis aims at investigating the multi-professional nature of these services and the use of epistemic artifacts (or knowledge tools), such as information systems, for creating and sharing knowledge in the practices. Second analysis is done of questionnaire data collected from the developers of the practices. The questionnaire gathers data from issues such as the actual use the epistemic artifacts as well as other questions relating to the knowledge work and use of knowledge tools. The aim of these analyses are to make sense about the ways in which knowledge creation and use are organized in these cases and what kinds of tools are applied in the cases (i.e., to inquire about the actual knowledge practices within these service practices). The analyses aim at providing relevant information about knowledge practices and the benefits and difficulties related to multi-professional knowledge work in these cases. Knowledge practices and open-ended objects The concept of knowledge practices or epistemic practices has been used for denoting a special set of practices relating to knowledge. In some cases, it is used for denoting all kinds of practices concerned with knowledge, such as keeping a diary of incoming and outgoing vehicles in a factory. Other authors, especially Karin Knorr-Cetina, have connected the term with more specific