Introduction

The opening chapter of the book Social Work during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Glocal Perspectives and Implications for the Future of Social Work represents the question of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected social work, its clients, employees, and organisations. The introductory chapter represents key frameworks and concepts, which are at least implicit and shared throughout the book. Such perspectives are offered by the concepts of the social-ecological fabric of societies and its governance, the adaptive capacity of social work communities and the resilience of social work professionals, which all frame the place, basic task and normative basis of social work, its readiness for change, and capability to act in a rapidly changing, complex, polycentric, and glocal operating environment. At the same time, the introductory chapter introduces the work's 15 empirical chapters, all of which are briefly presented at the end of the introductory chapter. The introductory chapter creates a common task setting for the empirical analyses of the work, which the authors of the introductory chapter return to consider in the final chapter of the work.