In his lecture series at the Collège de France during the academic year 1977/78, Michel Foucault focused on the genealogy of the modern state. The key concept of this perspective is government: "La Gouvernementalité." Foucault relates government not only to questions of institutionalized forms of power in modern statehood but also to various forms of guiding people. Studies on governmentality have highlighted the value of such a power-analytical approach, particularly in English and French-speaking contexts, over the past few years. Building on this, the present study introduces a discourse-analytically oriented governmentality of social work. This represents the first systematic framework of its kind for the German-speaking debate on social work. Social pedagogy.