The aim of this study was to investigate how social workers on a Chief Guardian unit work from their conditions when recruiting guardians. More specifically, we wanted to see how the law, the practise and the professionals’ tacit knowledge affect their judgement of guardians and how the organisation and the government of the Chief Guardian unit affect their work. The Chief Guardian unit is a municipal supervisor that control and supervise the work of the guardian. Media has criticized the Chief Guardian unit, by highlighting examples of unfit guardians. The Swedish National Audit Office (Riksrevisionen) has expressed a number of shortcomings of the supervision by the County administrative boards of Sweden (Länsstyrelsen). Because the Chief Guardian units lack a common governmental monitoring, internal solutions are created by every individual unit. In this qualitative study we have tried to understand how the social workers practise their profession. Through semi-structured interviews with eight social workers in three different Chief Guardian units, we have interpreted the views of their work. The theoretical framework was primarily founded on Polanyi´s theory of tacit knowledge and the ideas of occupational and organizational professionalism. The results of our study showed that the reality for the social workers is a mix of occupational and organizational professionalism. All the informants describe their work as heavily controlled by laws and regulations, but with a certain freedom of how to conduct their work. They find the tacit knowledge and the collegial support very important when it comes to assessing guardians. All the informants state that an organizational change is crucial to guarantee the legal security of guardians and caretakers.

My research problem is that there are different ways to organize a chief guardians office at the same time as the Deputy Inquiry (2021:36) gives suggestions on making one type of organization form mandatory. The chief guardians are not uniform and the muncipalities can organize their chief guardians office in different ways. At the same time, the Deputy Inquiry (2021:36) have given a proposals to restrict municipal self government in order to ensure increased quality and legal certainty in the exercise of authority through a certain type of organization.The purpose of my thesis is to shed light on muncicipalities choice of organizational form for their chief guardians office and officials perceptions of its advantages and disadvantages of the same. The thesis theoretical framework is partly organizations as instruments, partly the values of democray, rule of law and efficiency. I use a qualitative reserach design where my material consists of interviews and public documents. My conclusion is that there are different reasons/purposes for the chosen forms of organization. The purposes are not identical with each other. The purposes also differs between whether the chief guardians office is conducted in-house or through collaboration.My thesis shows that the pros and cons of the different types of form of organization differs.Regardless of whether the organization is in collaboration or under its own auspeices, the bord of chief guardian or chief guardian can contribute to organizational structures that can have different advantages and disadvantages. Chief guardians that are organized via intermunicipal collboration can easily recruit personel, has judicial competence and has more personel. They also contribute to increased uniformity over a larger geographic area. But they can also have negative effects such as can be derived from structure. An unexpected but interesting finding that emerged during my work is to be ”made visible”. In my analysis Iargue that democracy maybe is the value that underlies efficieny and rule of law.There are perceptions about a most appropriate way to organize the chief guardians office of. My conclusion is that the joint committe is perceived to be the most appropriate form of organization.