Professional capital contested: A bourdieusian analysis of conflicts between professionals and managers

Although Bourdieu paid scant attention to (and in fact discredited) the notion of professionalism, his social theory is well-equipped to understand the evolution of professional work. Professionalism can be conceived as a set of symbolic resources that (re)produce an occupational order, favoring expertise and craftsmanship. In neo-liberal economies this order is contested and professional powers are distrusted; professional work is seen as closed-off and conservative. Managers have become important vehicles for rationalizing and innovating production, and improving "value for money." In fact, managerial "fields" are created, and conflicts between managerial and professional fields are well documented. These conflicts are ironic, as new classes of managers seek classic strategies of professionalization as well as classic forms of professional capital for securing managerial positions. They form professional associations, for instance, and invest in schooling, credentials and work codes. This paper explores conflicts between professionals and managers as "contests over symbolic capital." We argue that professional capital is appropriated by managers in order to distinguish "new" from "old" professional work in larger economized fields of power

Interactive identity work of professionals in management : a hospital case study

Hybrid professional managers appear less effective in introducing management into public professional settings than policymakers hope. To date, research has offered little understanding of professionals’ identity transition challenge and the role of social interactions underpinning this process. We studied the identity work of hybrid doctors inside a large public health-care organization, finding that it takes place through processes of familiarizing with management, rationalizing being a hybrid, and legitimizing the new role-identity. We contribute to the literature by showing that identity work is distributed and enabled by social interactions beyond the professional group. Implications for policymakers and executives are discussed

Єврорегіон як елемент інтеграції у європейський простір

1 Introductie Rechters en raadsheren ervaren spanning tussen productiedruk enerzijds en de kwaliteit van de Rechtspraak anderzijds. Professionele standaarden kunnen helpen bij het bepalen wat wel en niet acceptabel is in relatie tot de kwaliteit van werk. In opdracht van de Raad voor de rechtspraak deed USBO (Universiteit Utrecht) vergelijkend onderzoek naar professionele standaarden van medisch specialisten, accountants en politieagenten, met als doel lessen te genereren voor de ontwikkeling van professionele standaarden in de Rechtspraak. 2 Vraagstelling en aanpak De leidende onderzoeksvraag was: ‘Op welke wijze zijn professionele standaarden in andere beroepsgroepen tot stand gekomen en geïntroduceerd, hoe worden deze standaarden geborgd en actueel gehouden en welke lessen kan de Rechtspraak hieruit trekken?’ We startten met literatuuronderzoek. Vervolgens voerden we desk research uit naar professionele standaarden in de drie beroepsgroepen (medisch specialisten, accountants en politieagenten) en interviewden we sleutelfiguren. Voor de vertaling van de resultaten naar de Rechtspraak spraken we in (groeps) interviews met rechters en raadsheren. 3 Theoretische inkadering Professionele standaarden richten zich op het formeel en informeel definiëren, coderen en ijken van de beroepsuitoefening, door beroepsgroepen zelf, als onderdeel van verdergaande professionalisering van een beroepsgroep. In figuur 1 werken we de professionele standaarden verder uit. De kern van professionele standaarden bestaat uit idealen (de ambitiecode). De educatieve code vult deze idealen verder in, zodat standaarden op casusniveau binnen de beroepspraktijk toepasbaar zijn. De regulerende code formuleert vervolgens normen en protocollen die bij niet-naleven gekoppeld kunnen worden aan sancties. Naast deze codes hebben professionals steeds meer te maken met aanvullende standaardisering door beleidskaders (wettelijke kaders en beleidsbepalingen) en organisatorische kaders (tijd, geld en capaciteit). Professioneel werk vraagt om verbinding tussen de binnenste drie ringen en de buitenste ring. Organiseren en management zijn onlosmakelijke onderdelen van professioneel werk. Naast handelen vanuit de eigen professie moeten professionals ook ‘organisatieverantwoordelijk’ handelen

"A manager in the minds of doctors" : a comparison of new modes of control in European hospitals

Background: Hospital governance increasingly combines management and professional self-governance. This article maps the new emergent modes of control in a comparative perspective and aims to better understand the relationship between medicine and management as hybrid and context-dependent. Theoretically, we critically review approaches into the managerialism-professionalism relationship; methodologically, we expand cross-country comparison towards the meso-level of organisations; and empirically, the focus is on processes and actors in a range of European hospitals. Methods: The research is explorative and was carried out as part of the FP7 COST action IS0903 Medicine and Management, Working Group 2. Comprising seven European countries, the focus is on doctors and public hospitals. We use a comparative case study design that primarily draws on expert information and document analysis as well as other secondary sources. Results: The findings reveal that managerial control is not simply an external force but increasingly integrated in medical professionalism. These processes of change are relevant in all countries but shaped by organisational settings, and therefore create different patterns of control: (1) ‘integrated’ control with high levels of coordination and coherent patterns for cost and quality controls; (2) ‘partly integrated’ control with diversity of coordination on hospital and department level and between cost and quality controls; and (3) ‘fragmented’ control with limited coordination and gaps between quality control more strongly dominated by medicine, and cost control by management. Conclusions: Our comparison highlights how organisations matter and brings the crucial relevance of ‘coordination’ of medicine and management across the levels (hospital/department) and the substance (cost/quality-safety) of control into perspective. Consequently, coordination may serve as a taxonomy of emergent modes of control, thus bringing new directions for cost-efficient and quality-effective hospital governance into perspective

De cultuur in het openbaar bestuur onder vuur?: De invloed van cultuur op ongenoegen, verminderde trots en vertrek(intentie) van ambtenaren.

Uit onderzoeksrapporten blijkt dat de organisatiecultuur in het openbaar bestuur al jarenlang één van de belangrijkste aspecten is waarover ongenoegen bestaat onder ambtenaren. Aan de hand van een aantal toonaangevende cultuuraspecten binnen het openbaar bestuur onderzoeken we wat er precies mis is met en/of binnen die cultuur. We kijken daarbij naar de cultuuraspecten menselijke maat, lerend vermogen, inclusiviteit, wendbaarheid, missiegedrevenheid en samenwerkingsgerichtheid. Op basis van analyses van het Werkonderzoek 2022 onder duizenden ambtenaren worden twee hoofdconclusies getrokken. Ten eerste blijken ambtenaren relatief weinig terug te zien van de door bedrijfsmatige waarden ingegeven wendbaarheid en missiegedrevenheid binnen het openbaar bestuur. Bovendien dragen deze twee cultuuraspecten nauwelijks bij aan trots en organisatietevredenheid en zorgen ze er soms zelfs voor dat ambtenaren de organisatie erdoor willen verlaten. Ten tweede blijkt slechts een kleine meerderheid van de ambtenaren het door professionele waarden ingegeven lerend vermogen terug te zien terwijl dit aspect het meest sterk de vertrekintentie van ambtenaren kan voorkomen en hun trots en organisatietevredenheid kan versterken. Daarom moeten publieke organisaties enerzijds laveren tussen te weinig en te veel

Designing to Debias: Measuring and Reducing Public Managers’ Anchoring Bias

Public managers’ decisions are affected by cognitive biases. For instance, employees’ previous year's performance ratings influence new ratings irrespective of actual performance. Nevertheless, experimental knowledge of public managers’ cognitive biases is limited, and debiasing techniques have rarely been studied. Using a survey experiment on 1,221 public managers and employees in the United Kingdom, this research (1) replicates two experiments on anchoring to establish empirical generalization across institutional contexts and (2) tests a consider-the-opposite debiasing technique. The results indicate that anchoring bias replicates in a different institutional context, although effect sizes differ. Furthermore, a low-cost, low-intensity consider-the-opposite technique mitigates anchoring bias in this survey experiment. An exploratory subgroup analysis indicates that the effect of the intervention depends on context. The next step is to test this strategy in real-world settings

Describing and measuring leadership within school teams by applying a social network perspective

Despite the growing number of studies that acknowledge a crucial role of distributed leadership within schools, limited knowledge exists on how to describe and measure this multi-faceted concept. In a social network study with 130 respondents, from 14 Dutch school teams carrying out collaborative innovation, we theoretically describe three core aspects of the social interaction process of distributed leadership: collective, dynamic, or relational. Furthermore, we empirically explore how to measure all these three aspects of distributed leadership from a social network perspective, whereas most research focuses on either collective or dynamic. Our findings indicate that three network measures (density, reciprocity, indegree centralization) form a coherent combination to measure distributed leadership in school teams in terms of collective, relational, and dynamic, respectively. Furthermore, based on the combination of measures we found differences in distributed leadership between school teams. Thus, adding the relational aspect in addition to the collective and dynamic aspects seems to be informative to measure distributed leadership. Our study motivates to take a social network perspective, instead of the mostly used aggregation approaches, to measure distributed leadership in school teams