"We have so much power and still, we feel completely powerless almost all the time:"

Abstract: The aim of this thesis is to study how social workers experience and understand the laws they are regulated by, and if they perceive that the laws give them the right conditions to fulfil their purpose(s). Social Services have the important task of protecting society’s vulnerable groups, one of them being children, which entails huge power over other people’s lives, which is why social workers are heavily regulated by law. In Sweden examples of those laws are the Social Services Act (Socialtjänstlagen) and the Parental Code (Föräldrabalken). By conducting semi-structured interviews with eight social workers in Skåne county, Sweden, and thematically analysing their answers with Ewick & Silbey’s (1998) theory on legal narratives and four dimensions of legal consciousness, the thesis finds that the social workers have a complex perspective on the law. They continuously describe problems and obstacles that it creates, while still defending its shape and moral starting point. The application of Ewick & Silbey’s (1998) before the law narrative shows tendencies of two of those narratives: before the law and with the law, which emphasises the complex and sometimes contradicting statements of the participants’ perspective on the law.