The article advocates for a more socially transformative and non-individual-oriented approach to social pedagogy, emphasizing the potential of the empowerment concept in efforts to contribute to individuals' emancipation and the transformation of their life conditions. The significance of this pedagogical aim is examined based on an exploration of the historical development of social pedagogy as a normative and political foundational idea, inspired by two central pedagogical and learning theorists: Paulo Freire and Oskar Negt. Drawing on these critical social analyses and transformative possibilities, illustrative examples from previous studies of social pedagogical practice are included to uncover the presence or absence of educators' reflections on critical social and transformative perspectives and transgressive orientations. The prevailing societal tendency towards an individualized and organizationally internal perspective is revealed to dominate, with the reduced social pedagogical potential inherent in such a compensatory view of citizens. However, another study indicates that the need for pedagogical encounters across the organizational frameworks of the workplace can highlight the importance of a broader societal perspective, with solidaristic identification and a focus on the empowerment of the citizens involved. This might be a useful way to contribute to a renewed generation of meaning and a transformative dimension of social pedagogical work, as well as its practitioners in this field.
Elite university admissions are administered by a range of organizational actors depending on national and institutional contexts. While the outcomes of high-stakes elite university admissions have been studied extensively, the opaque admissions selection process remains undertheorized and understood. Using theories of professions and systems theory to examine unique qualitative interview data from admissions selectors in both the U.S. and England, this paper sheds light on the opaque decision-making of elite university admissions shaped by professional contexts and organizational dynamics. We find that the self-regulated profession of professors and the less autonomous professional staff selectors influence the decision-making processes of elite university admissions. Understanding elite university admissions based on the macro/meso-context of professions and their organizational system structure offers a theoretically original approach for future research and the potential to create more equitable admissions processes through new change strategies.
Working with others is key to professionalism but little attention has been given to how specific actions contribute to collective practices to secure shared ends in work. This essay considers how professionals’ actions connect with one another in distributed (multi-participant) work practices. Recently, Hopwood, Blomberg, Dahlberg and Abrant Dahlgren identified a new way of viewing how professionals in distributed practices coordinate their actions to accomplish shared ends, in terms of phenomena they describe as “connective enactments” and “collective accomplishments”. In this essay, we explore the possibility that these phenomena have far more general application than the cases studied by Hopwood et al. We use the theory of practice architectures to outline this more general account and test its viability in by examining a case of culinary services practices. This more generalised account may offer new ways to understand features of distributed work practices and enhance professional practice and learning.
AbstractA plethora of studies have documented the changing nature of professional work and the organizations in which it takes place. Among the most documented trends are the emergence of managerial–professional hybrid workers and professional (re)stratification. Although the links between these two trends have been noted, their interconnections have not been fully explored. This article analyzes data from a mixed-methods study of professional engineers in Ontario, Canada, to explore the extent to which they experience conflicting logics, hybridity, resistance, and restratification. Findings indicate that many engineers could be classified as hybrid, as they see managerial roles as an extension of engineering. At the same time, many others see managers as oppositional to engineers, with different priorities. On the whole, there is evidence of restratification as the work experiences, professional attitudes, and responses to conflicting logics (hybridity or resistance) vary between managers and employees. This restratification has the potential to undermine professional unity.
This paper investigates how health professions compete and cooperate in addressing emerging local work tasks defined in relation to new globalized health challenges, such as type 2 diabetes. It identifies which professional groups have claimed responsibility for the tasks and by means of which kinds of interactions and infighting. The materials entail workplace-related artefacts and documents; in-depth interviews and extended conversations with health professionals about goals, dilemmas, and practices linked to prevention of lifestyle-related diseases; and site visits at Danish hospitals. Grounding Abbott’s framework of jurisdictions and his meso-level vocabulary in a situated account of professional boundary work, the analysis follows the ways that nurses in particular create, and sometimes stabilize or standardize, techniques for a disease prevention programme less than a decade old. The paper argues that processual theory of boundary work would benefit from grounding in a situated account of forms of professional boundaries within emerging jurisdictional tasks.
The professions are committed to promoting certain values such as social justice and empowerment. But how should these abstract values be interpreted? We argue that an adequate methodology for the study of values relevant to the professions must include principles for dealing with implicit background assumptions and shared understandings embedded in different social perspectives, and that central among these is a principle of grounding the inquiry in the experience of vulnerable or oppressed groups of living with oppression. To illustrate the approach, we include an example of how ethnographic studies can be used in the analysis of values relevant to the professions.
Hilde Rakvaag, Gunn Elisabeth Søreide, Reidun Lisbet Skeide Kjome
Interprofessional collaboration between different professions within health care is essential to optimize patient outcomes. Community pharmacists (CPs) and general practitioners (GPs) are two professions who are encouraged to increase their collaboration. In this metasynthesis we use a meta-ethnographic approach to examine the interpersonal aspects of this collaboration, as perceived by the professionals themselves. The metasynthesis firstly suggests that CPs and GPs have differing storylines about the cooperation between them. Secondly, CPs seem to position their profession in relation to the GPs, whereas GPs do not rely on the CPs to define their professional position. A successful collaboration between the two professions requires the CPs to reposition themselves through adopting a proactive approach towards the GPs. This proactive approach should comprise the delivery of specific clinical advice, as well as taking responsibility for this advice. In this way, they can build a more coinciding storyline of the joint agenda of improved patient care.
The aim of the article is to show how childhood research contributes to the understanding of culture and society. Through examples taken from different studies in child-institutions, it is argued that not only do such studies extend our knowledge of children's lives and contemporary conditions of childhood, they also provide insights into fundamental cultural values as well as in social divisions and reproductive dynamics of society.
The public health sector in welfare states is increasingly subject to organisational changes, particularly in hospitals, as organisations comprise coali-tions of various (healthcare) professionals. In this context, due to interprofessional competition, knowledge claims play an important role in achieving jurisdictional control. In this paper, we investigate the manifestations of and health professionals’ reactions to competing institutional discourses. Through qualitative interviews with hospital management, middle managers, and staff employees at three hospitals in Denmark, we demonstrate how managerial attempts to control tenacious profes-sional bureaucracies are exercised through both bureaucratic forms of control and cultural-ideological modes of control with an introduction of new discourses of in-terprofessional teamwork. The findings suggest that hospitals seek not only to con-tain ambiguity through bureaucratic features of control, but also to cultivate it when seeking to strengthen cooperation between professions. Thereby, ambiguity itself becomes a mechanism for management.
The development of college degree for the Norwegian police education consists of a number of controversies and tensions, and this article discusses four key issues of contradictions in The Norwegian Police University College relatively short-lived history of 25 years. The demanding issues relate to the balance between breadth and depth in the education, short-term or long-term horizons for the training, the organization of the subjects in the curriculum and most of all the deviation of experience- versus scientific knowledge.
Per Nerdrum, Amy Østertun Geirdal, Per Andreas Høglend
Psychological distress have been found to be high and influence negatively nurses’ and teachers’ work. In this nine-year project, we present the first longitudinal study comparing psychological distress from 1467 students and young professionals in nursing and teaching. Psychological distress was measured with GHQ 12 at the start and the end of their studies and three and six years after graduation. Both descriptive statistics and estimated models were used to assess psychological distress over time. Psychological distress increased significantly in both groups during education. The reduction of psychological distress was significant among the nurses, and they clearly showed a “healthy worker effect” when coming into clinical work. The teachers had a small and non-significant reduction in the same period and did not show a positive effect after starting pedagogical work.
The present article describes and analyses the emergence and development of a professional field called social integration. Ideas, theories, and occupational practices forming this field are explored, particularly those related to the development of a new discipline, that of psychotherapy. The development of three occupations (psychiatry, psychology and social work) and their professionalisation is described through their qualitative and quantitative take‑offs in particular historical periods. Three periods are identified: formation, 1850-1920, when psychiatry was defined as a medical sub-discipline; consolidation, 1920-1945, with the institutionalisation of psychiatric care, and with psychoanalysis and mental hygiene as qualitatively new cognitive bases for practitioners; and professionalisation, 1945-1980, with the deinstitutionalisation of psychiatric care and the professionalisation of psychologists and social workers. New ideas on subjectivity and individualism, new welfare state institutions, as well as collaborative professionalism all favoured the creation of psychotherapy as professional knowledge, and a possible new profession of psychotherapists.