Ideas of social work's role in society have changed considerably over the last decades, as shown by the comparison of international social work definitions over time. At the level of discourse, social work is no longer considered a mere target of top-down policy and welfare reform, but has been assigned an active role in shaping the structural environment of clients and users of welfare programmes. This normative ideal seems internationally widespread, although national codes of ethics in social work still differ in detail as regards the acknowledgement of the political activities of social workers (Weiss-Gal & Gal, 2014: 185–90). In addition, there is a remarkable lack of knowledge on how the political function of social work actually plays out in practice. This is all the more important as the socio-political context of social work clients and welfare users has recently faced significant change. Contemporary welfare states of the ‘global North’ focused on in this volume are, among other things, characterised by an extension of ‘welfare markets’ (for example, Taylor-Gooby, 1999; Bode, 2008), new paradigms of social investment (for example, Morel et al, 2012) and enhanced individual responsibilities for welfare provision under different activation schemes (for example, Serrano Pascual & Magnusson, 2007). These changes have an important impact on the relationship among social work, its clients and the welfare state. In line with Simpson and Connor (2011, 1), we take a critical stance on positions where ‘[l]ike actors in front of a blue screen, those individuals and groups who provide and receive welfare services are just expected to accept this new backdrop to their lives and seek ways to adapt and rise to the challenge of this new context’. Instead, we share the idea that welfare professionals are an important part of and need to critically engage with social policy, and that there is a need to further the ‘policy literacy’ of citizens and practitioners of social welfare alike. By presenting an international collection of social work's more or less successful activities in the making of social policy, this book seeks to contribute to that aim.