Instant messengers and health professionals’ agency in Russian clinical settings

This research examines how Russian healthcare professionals use instant messengers (in particular, the group chat function on instant messengers) for work-related tasks. Based on qualitative interviews with Russian doctors and nurses conducted in spring 2020, the article explores how the informal implementation of instant messenger's group chat function facilitated and shaped health professionals' agency in two key areas of professional control: work regulation and medical knowledge. In the first case, front-line healthcare professionals used instant messengers to make horizontal connections, share relevant regulatory information, and smooth over organizational discrepancies. Hospital management, on the other hand, employed this technology as an additional tool for imposing top-down control on employees. The adoption of instant messengers for medical knowledge dissemination is more consistently linked with professional logic. By utilizing this technology, healthcare personnel not only shared clinical recommendations, publications, and clinical experience, but also fostered solidarity within the country's medical community and forged connections with international medical professionals. These findings support the social science assumption concerning the contextualized character of both professionalism and digital innovations in healthcare. In state-dominated Russian healthcare, instant messengers not only assist structurally disempowered professionals in dealing with pragmatic challenges, but also create more space for their ground-level discretion in the face of intense administrative pressure. Moreover, since the messaging technology helps Russian health workers in navigating and agentially connecting different knowledge and regulatory landscapes, it also fosters a new - trans-local and more reflexive – form of professionalism in post-socialist medicine.Peer reviewe

Employment and social affairs

This contribution was delivered on the occasion of the EUI State of the Union in Florence on 5 May 2016.This intervention was part of the recorded SoU morning sessions that took place on 5 May 2016 available on Youtube; move to the part of the video session of your interest within the video recording.This panel will consider some of the gendered dynamics shaping labour markets, social protection and social inequality in present-day Europe and locate those dynamics in a longer-term historical perspective. It will discuss evolving patterns of labour market access for women and young people; social inequalities in view of the “second demographic transition” (lower fertility across social classes, higher levels of education for women, higher levels of divorce among poorer couples); and the specific impact of the euro-crisis on women and their mobilizations in the face of the crisis. All of these questions will be placed in a longer-term perspective that considers the dynamic interactions between women’s uneven access to labour markets across 19th and 20th century Europe and the ways that women’s unequal access has been imbricated with highly gendered policies of social protection in the construction of European welfare states