Human service professionals deal with a wide range of problems, from child abuse, parenting issues, and elderly care, to addictions, mental illness, sexual assault, unemployment, and criminality. These must be constructed as problems for professionals to appropriately respond to them. Human service provision starts from there. But in the everyday experience of service providers and users alike, there is a parallel world of ordinary troubles that remains professionally undefined but real, even when troubles are turned into problems.

1. Troubles, Problems, and Clientization Jaber F. Gubrium and Margaretha Järvinen Part 1: Individual Challenges 2. Listening and the Paradox of Autonomy in Elderly Care Homes Jens Kofod 3. Parent Constructions of Problem Location and Clienthood in Child Welfare Services Maarit Alasuutari 4. Untidy Clientization: Drug Users Resisting Institutional Identities Margaretha Järvinen Part 2: Collective Challenges 5. Psychiatric Diagnosis as Collective Action in a Residential Therapeutic Community Darin Weinberg 6. Wild Girls and the Deproblematization of Troubled Lives Kathrine Vitus 7. The Imagined Psychology of Being Overweight in a Weight Loss Program Nanna Mik-Meyer Part 3: Competing Perspectives 8. Troubles? Problems? Comparing Social Workers' and Older Persons' Perspectives on Elder Self-Neglect Tova Band-Winterstein, Israel Doron, and Sigal Naim 9. Participant Meaning-Making Along the Work Trajectory of a Labor Activation Program Erika Gubrium 10. Constructing the System in a Remand Prison Thomas Ugelvik Part 4: Contending Clienthoods 11. How Occupational Identity Constructs Clienthood in Sexual Assault Exams Lara Foley 12. Tenability, Troubles, and Psychiatric Problems in Practice James A. Holstein 13. From Troubling Actions to Troubled Lives: Sex Offender Registration and Notification Richard Tewksbury and David Patrick Connor