‪“Social work”, a major academic and institutional category, is still today the subject of vivid controversy as to its delimitation. The aim of this article is to take a general look at the human and social science literature on “social work”, in order to distinguish different currents, their epistemological positions and their competition. By retracing the debates of the last few decades, the article proposes to review how the multiple uses of the term and the question of the perimeter of social work professions partially structure the field of academic and professional research and how these professions contribute, in turn, to building the object “social work”.‪