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"Die Kinderrechtekonvention (KRK) der Vereinten Nationen enthält individuelle, emanzipative Grundrechte neben moralischen Kategorien wie Elternverantwortung und Kindeswohl. Der Aufsatz rekonstruiert die historische Entwicklung der rechtlichen Stellung des Kindes zwischen Familie und Staat in Deutschland. Der Blick auf das in der KRK angelegte Spannungsfeld zwischen individueller Rechtsposition und Pflege und Schutz des Kindes, das auch als Gravitationszentrum der rechtlichen Entwicklung in Deutschland identifiziert werden kann, legt Selektivitätsmechanismen in der Verteilung auf Adressatengruppen frei und verweist auf politische Agenden hinter den Gesetzgebungsprozessen. Welche Rolle spielt hier wirklich das Interesse des Kindes? Mit Zweifeln an der Eignung des Staats als Wahrer dieser Interessen und an dem historischen Zug der Verrechtlichung der Eltern-Kind-Beziehungen werden abschließend zentrale Problemfelder skizziert, die weitere Diskussionen und Bearbeitung erfordern." (Autorenreferat)

This paper is basically about the ongoing interactions of two persons, situated in the same office, regarding the question of how to map the actual dynamics of what in a neo-institutional perspective is designated as organisational fields. In their efforts, both persons also interacted directly or indirectly with a whole range of other persons as, for instance, the authors of various journal articles and seminar students of the bachelor degree in social and educational sciences at the University of Luxembourg. The paper is written in a narrative style, as it retraces the train of thought and action leading to a first formulation of what they have, to put it in the terms of Wagner (1981), invented and covenanted as being an hermeneutics of scaling. This process might, retrospectively, be best described as a process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. In this sense, the present paper has to be seen as a temporary materialisation of ideas being exchanged in an ongoing interaction process taking on a certain pattern which, on the long run, eventually materialises in a more or less formalised network.

This contribution is basically about how the authors, co-teaching a social work class on "political, social and judicial systems" developed a concept of scaling-reflexive professionalism to be taught in scaling-reflexive teaching. Scaling-reflexive professionalism implies at least three aspects. Firstly, it refers to the professionals' ability of questioning what could be termed as collectively shared understandings of how professionals have to act on their 'clients' with regard to the organisation and the field they are working in. Secondly, it means that professionals have to be sensible to the ongoing scaling work in organisations and fields, i.e. concurrent enactment by different people in different places – governance units or arenas, front- or border-line services – of partially conflicting, emotionally conglutinated and more or less materially cemented ideas/beliefs. Thirdly, it implies that professionals are able, in interaction with persons that are organisationally scaled as 'clients', to 'control' their own professional scales in order to understand the scales deployed by the latter. From here, the teaching challenge turns out to be twofold. On the one hand, theoretical knowledge - as scales - has to be anchored in the students' stock of experience, and on the other, students have to acquire competence in making use of it. Therefore, scaling-reflexivity has to be taught in scaling-reflexive interactions. In a first step, we as teachers need to discover a bigger range of our students' scaling universes, and we have to create situations of interaction with our own universes. In a second step, we need to confront the scales of administrators, professionals and clients in social service organisations with their own and those of their teachers through field research - mainly interviews with these different actors. Law, technologies and organigrams and so on progressively then begin to appear in their characteristic as conventions . Students would discover them as such and begin to analyse professional scopes of intervention for the well-being of their clients.

Sociology's knowledge-making practices consist primarily in cutting social reality (realities) into distinct, but overlapping and abstract entities, which are variously juxtaposed and micro-/macrofied depending on the underlying theoretical assumptions as they are "worked" by researchers. (Social) research as an ongoing process of cutting abstract entities is thus producing an almost infinite plurality of scales. In this sense, it is not surprising that we periodically assist at the emergence of new "turns", from the cognitive to the material and the linguistic or emotional. This group addresses persons who are interested in working on how persons-as-researchers-and-theorists-cut-and-invent-social-reality. For the organizers, the work of Andrew Abbott as well as Marilyn Strathern has inspired the following questions: How do social theories cut, invent and try to covenant social reality? How is social reality cut, invented and covenanted in so-called professional contexts? How is social reality cut, invented and covenanted by methods of social research?

In this presentation we retrace a process of ongoing 'invention' and 'convention' of a scaling-sensible text analysis. With conceiving of a relational world, the distinction of 'subject' and 'object of analysis' dissolves. Thus, the audience is invited to take a journey through various fractal cutouts of our relational world, in some way or another related to a pilot study of scaling-sensible text analysis. These cutouts are disclosed through three fractal narratives, each one taken on with a different fractal size. Thereby, we approach questions such as: What do persons do when writing scientific texts? How do they relate to entities they cut as 'ontologically being'? How can we methodologically go about scientific texts, if we conceive of them as inventions, respectively as bearing ever singular 'ontologies'? How can we develop a scaling-sensible attitude in the analysis of texts as well as in scientific writing? Eventually, we do not intend to give any definite conclusions or the like. Rather, we seek to suggest new pathways of analysis and to offer the audience various scales to think with.

This contribution relates the authors' experiences of applying a relational and scaling-sensitive approach to human service clients within the framework of a research training project with bachelor degree students in social work. By conceiving persons as relational (and not self-actional or interactional entities) and hypothesising that persons-in-relation-at-places-in-time cut the 'world' into scales of various ideational, emotional and material dimensionality, the basic question consisted of how persons as clients relate to and scale persons as professionals and members of so-called social services, and thereby continuously reinvent and covenante social reality. On the one hand, the presentation will put to discussion the pursued methodological movement by giving direct insight into the analytical process of transcribing, relationing and comparing. On the other hand, we will discuss the 'merits' of such a movement, especially with regard to questions of equivocity, ambiguity, hybridity or, as we would put it, fractality of social reality. Indeed, persons and places (or any other thinglike entity) take on a holographic stance depending on the relationalities.

Fragen des Kinderschutzes sind so aktuell wie auch Gegenstand heißer Kontroversen. Soziale Interventionen in diesem Bereich werden durch verschiedene Zugänge und Handlungsansätze geprägt, die eine Vielfalt von Rationalitäten widerspiegeln. In dem Band wird aufgezeigt, wie diese Rationalitäten die Praxis des Feldes, dessen politisch-administrative und rechtliche Normierung und die von den beteiligten Akteuren genutzten Konzeptionen beeinflussen. Die Autorinnen und Autoren analysieren sozialpädagogische, juristische, politisch-administrative und managerielle Diskurse, aber auch und vor allem deren Interdependenzen - mit dem Ergebnis eines besseren emprischen Verständnisses und einer gestärkten Reflexivität der Praxis der Sozialen Arbeit.