Errors in Veterinary Practice: Preliminary Lessons for Building Better Veterinary Teams

Case studies in two typical UK veterinary practices were undertaken to explore teamwork, including interprofessional working. Each study involved one week of whole team observation based on practice locations (reception, operating theatre), one week of shadowing six focus individuals (veterinary surgeons, veterinary nurses and administrators) and a final week consisting of semistructured interviews regarding teamwork. Errors emerged as a finding of the study. The definition of errors was inclusive, pertaining to inputs or omitted actions with potential adverse outcomes for patients, clients or the practice. The 40 identified instances could be grouped into clinical errors (dosing/drugs, surgical preparation, lack of follow-up), lost item errors, and most frequently, communication errors (records, procedures, missing face-to-face communication, mistakes within face-to-face communication). The qualitative nature of the study allowed the underlying cause of the errors to be explored. In addition to some individual mistakes, system faults were identified as a major cause of errors. Observed examples and interviews demonstrated several challenges to interprofessional teamworking which may cause errors, including: lack of time, part-time staff leading to frequent handovers, branch differences and individual veterinary surgeon work preferences. Lessons are drawn for building better veterinary teams and implications for Disciplinary Proceedings considered

Rethinking connectivity as recontextualisation: issues for research and practice

This contribution explains why, once a number of issues which were an explicit and implicit feature of the connective typology of work experience (Griffiths/Guile, 2004) are conceptualised as the recontextualisation of knowledge, it becomes possible to see that boundary crossing is a ubiquitous feature of vocational and professional education, rather than an issue of learners crossing the boundary between education and work. The contribution tackles this goal in the following way. Firstly, it offers a brief explanation of the development of the connective typology of work experience. Next, it explains why the notion of ‘resitation’ in the connective typology of work experience was an early, but circumscribed, attempt to articulate the concept of recontextualisation. It then explains the origins and development of the concept of recontextualisation and that this concept offers a unified perspective on initial and continuing vocational formation. The contribution concludes by identifying a) the practical implication of the concept of recontextualisation for capacity/ competence development and b) the future research challenge for VET, especially in relation in the emergence of 4th generation technologies

Apprenticeship for 'Liquid Life': Learning in Contingent Work Conditions for Contingent Employment

Taking the distinction between the Institution of Apprenticeship, that is, the social partnership arrangements which underpin its organisation, and Apprenticeship as a Social Model of Learning, in other words, he configuration of pedagogic and occupational etc. dimensions which constitute the model, as its starting point the paper: (i) argues the emergence of de-centred, distributed and discontinuous conditions associated with project-work present challenges for extant ideas about apprenticeship as a social model of learning; (ii) explores this claim in relation to Fuller and Unwin’s four inter-connected dimensions of apprenticeship as a social model of learning by considering a case study of apprenticeship designed to prepare apprentices to work in the above conditions; (iii) relates issues arising from the case study to research on project work from the fields of Organisational and Cultural Studies; and (iv) based on this evidence base introduces a typology of ‘Apprenticeship for Liquid Life’

'Articulating value' for clients in a global engineering consulting firm: 'immaterial' activity and its implications for post-knowledge economy expertise

Moulier Boutang’s book Cognitive Capitalism introduces a radically different conception of the key resources – ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘capture of externalities’ – for economic activity, compared with the argument in the knowledge economy discourse that professionals manipulate ‘symbols’. The paper explores this claim by firstly, outlining the tenets of Moulier Boutang’s argument and explaining why it introduces a new conception of value compared with how that concept is normally defined in neo-classic and Marxist economics. Secondly, explaining why client-facing project teams constitute a paradigmatic example of immaterial activity. Thirdly, makes visible the modes of activity which facilitate the capture of externalities by supplementing Moulier Boutang’s concept with Boltanski and Thevénot’s ideas about different economies or conceptions of worth. Case study evidence of a global engineering consulting company is then used to identify three expressions of immaterial activity – educative’, ‘experimental’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ – that assist engineers to articulate their value to clients. The paper concludes by arguing immaterial activity: (i) constitutes a form of expertise that is very different from the prevailing knowledge economy wisdom that knowledge workers manipulate symbols explicitly or tacitly; and, (ii) problematises the sui generis nature of the global ‘employability’ skills discourse

New possibilities for the professionalization of UK VET professionals

Analyses the present condition of, and future possibilities for, the professionalization of those who work in vocational education and training in the UK. Argues that for the UK, as for other European countries, a high quality system of vocational education and training (VET) is a precondition for both a competitive economy and democratic society. Begins with a description of the current state and status of VET in the UK, and charts the legacy of 18 years of neo-liberal conservative government and its implications for the position of VET professionals. Identifies the new demands being made on VET professionals by changes in the global economy and develops a model of the VET professional as a connective specialist for responding to these demands. Explores two aspects of the model - pedagogy and the role of new technologies (telematics in particular) - in some detail. Finally, considers some of the political and economic policies needed for such a model to be implemented. © 1997, MCB UP Limite

Client-facing Interprofessional Project Teams: The Role of Engineers' 'Situated Judgment'

This paper addresses the type of engineering practice associated with ‘client-focused interprofessional project teams’ C-fIPPTs which is a typical pattern of work associated with engineering consulting companies. To do so, the article introduces the concepts of ‘situated judgment’ and ‘immaterial activity’ to the Engineering Studies community. It uses these concepts to demonstrate how engineers with different specialisms, working alongside architects, interior designers, etc., resolve competing conceptions of value among members to enable teams to accomplish project-specific issues. The article makes the above argument by drawing on observational data, interviews and field notes to illustrate the immaterial dimension (i.e. converting non-costed ideas into solutions to problems) of such situated judgments. The article concludes by firstly, explaining how the argument it advances about the distinctive features of engineering work contributes to a broadening of research on engineers work practice and, in doing so, the contribution that engineering studies can make to the field of workplace learning. Secondly, the article highlights the implications of its argument for engineering education and workplace learning

“Fractional” Vocational Working and Learning in Project Teams: “Project Assemblage” as a Unit of Analysis?

Situated and Activity theories have exercised a significant influence in the field of vocational learning for some considerable time, both sharing a focus on bounded forms of work and forms of learning that facilitate learning in, or to changes to, bounded forms of work. Yet much learning occurs in unbounded contexts often referred to as projectification, where collaborations occur only for the life of a project thereby creating new contingent contexts for learning. Given the existence of this form of working and learning, what type of unit of analysis (UoA) is required to analyse that vocational working and learning in the context of projectification? To address this question, the paper advances the following inter-theoretical argument. Firstly, it is timely to develop a new unit of analysis (UoA) to capture the fractional (intermittent, discontinuous and concurrent) working and learning dynamics associated with the forms of projectification, where funding has to be procured in order to commence. Secondly, that unit of analysis is constituted by the concept of project assemblage, which is based on ideas from Actor Network Theory, Cultural-historical Activity Theory and Cultural Sociology. Thirdly, this new UoA enables researchers to identify the way in which project teams, where members are coming in-and-out, learn to use their different forms of specialist activity to enact objects, why team members will have different backgrounds and understandings of their work, why objects may not cohere, even though team members may treat them as unified and coherent, and how team members learn to incorporate one another’s insights and suggestions, and establish a finalized object