Since the middle of the 1990s, ‘difference’ has been a subject dealt with intensively in international social work theory. Migration and gender studies especially have drawn attention to the fact that clients of social work are not only ‘different’, but ‘differently different’. Our article presents three prominent approaches to difference in social work: neglect of the other, recognition of the other (by emphasizing the necessity of identity) and the deconstruction of differences between the other and the non-other (by reading the powerfulness of binary structured differences).