This article explores how teachers understand the teacher-student relationship and how they establish trust with their incarcerated students. Interviews with 14 teachers working in Sweden have been analyzed using qualitative content analysis and concepts of professionalism. The findings show that establishing relationships and trust is crucial for succeeding in their professional mission and for exercising professional discretion. It can be challenging, however, as students have been convicted of crimes or can display manipulative behavior. Teachers, therefore, need to find ways to handle feelings such as suspicion, cynicism, and repugnance without damaging their students’ trust in their moral commitment and competence to serve the students’ best interests. The article contributes new knowledge about how teachers navigate institutional, moral, and emotional demands to create relationships that are both conducive to learning and aligned with security considerations, illuminating what it can mean to act professionally as a teacher in correctional settings.
Swedish principals have traditionally enjoyed a high degree of autonomy, with extensive responsibility for local schools. However, changes in governance and the expansion of central administration have challenged the conditions for principal autonomy and work. Through a multiple-case study of six Swedish municipalities, this paper aims to expand knowledge of the expansion and work of organizational professionals and their implications for traditional professionals. The findings illustrate that principals perceive this expansion as both controlling and supportive. Principals’ perceptions vary according to organizational professionals’ training, experience, assignments, and approaches to local decision-making. Although the expansion of organizational professionals may challenge principal autonomy at a general level, at the level of practice, principals express navigating these challenges to preserve professional autonomy. Overall, the study demonstrates that it is possible for principals and organizational professionals to develop a mutual understanding of how to control quality and improvement work without undermining principals’ professionalism.
Within theories of professions, clients of welfare-state professionals are typically portrayed as passive beneficiaries who are served and secured by professional expertise and ethics. This framing implicitly omits that in a client position, even the clients perform work. Drawing on a research project on rehabilitation following traumatic injuries, the article shows both the explicitly expected and recognised work that clients undertake while seeking to recover from impairments, and the largely invisible work shaped by implicit presuppositions embedded in professional services. The empirical findings form the basis for a discussion of the mechanisms by which this work is rendered invisible to professionals and within theories of professions, and of the implications for reconceptualising professionalism. Theories of professions must incorporate that clients are not merely subject to professional work, but that clients’ work is conducive to the outcomes commonly attributed to professionals’ work.
The article contributes to the growing research interest in professional agency and identity by examining how novice clergy experience their first years as parish pastors in the Church of Norway. Based on focus groups with newly graduated ministers, analysed with practice-theoretical and socio-cultural perspectives, we identify two modes. The first emerges when pastors enter traditional, well-established practices that lend them authority, clarity of task, and relational traction. The second mode is also afforded by enrolling in a traditional pastoral role but avoids defensiveness by being more improvisational and expressive, expanding the professional role in time and space. We argue that previous contributions (Campbell-Reed & Scharen, Reite) have tended to downplay the importance of ritual, stability and receptiveness. We further discuss (with Heikkilä) the relationship between our theorised modes, the clergy’s linguistic expression of their experiences, and the material and symbolic reality of the practices in which they participate.
This article examines how hospital-based professionals establish and negotiate their roles without relying on institutional agendas and logics, representing a reconfiguration of professional boundaries through community-based participatory research. Operating outside traditional clinical settings, we examine through interviews and observations how these professionals interact with elderly residents and researchers in shaping a community-oriented role for health professionals. Using Sida Liu’s concepts of boundary making and boundary blurring, the analysis shows how professional roles are actively enacted through individual reflection and collaborative efforts. Instead of simply reproducing or dissolving familiar roles, boundaries are intentionally reaffirmed, adapted, or co-created in response to the specific context and relational dynamics. The findings enhance boundary work literature by highlighting the micro-social and situational aspects of professional role negotiation. The study also prompts broader questions about how hospital-based professionals can engage in community healthcare practices through flexible, participatory approaches.
Across the UK and industrialised West, corporate law and medicine have diversified according to gender, yet their power has moved in opposite directions. This article asks what difference diversification makes to professions and the forms of power they exercise, with diversification defined here primarily as the increased representation of women and thus quantitative change. While mainstream accounts emphasise a ‘business case’ for diversity, which is expected to deliver organisational benefits such as productivity and performance, research on occupational segregation shows that demographic shifts can reduce occupational status even when outcomes remain equal. This paper brings related theories into dialogue with the sociology of the professions, using corporate law and medicine to argue that the effects of diversification vary by alignment: market-aligned law assimilates diversity as managed legitimacy to maintain power and hierarchy, while state-aligned medicine interprets or constructs feminisation as devaluation under audit and austerity. The paper advances a framework for understanding when diversity legitimises, destabilises, or enhances professions’ capacity to serve the public good.
Patient-centered care and patient choice are reshaping management practices in the Danish public healthcare sector. Patients are becoming more involved in their treatment and assuming greater control over their healthcare decisions. This transformation redefines relationships among patients, professionals, and the state. It raises important inquiries into how healthcare professionals navigate their new roles and responsibilities within this changing landscape. In this paper, we interviewed ten health professionals to delineate how they handle user involvement in daily clinical practice. Utilizing a sociology of profession framework for thematic analysis, our research revealed the disparities between the ideal and the actual implementation of patient-centered care. It highlighted the challenges healthcare professionals encounter in integrating shared decision-making practices and ensuring patients are adequately informed. We conclude that uncertainties regarding responsibility allocation and the boundaries of healthcare professional involvement often overshadow shared responsibility between healthcare professionals and patients.
This study examines how two collaborating professions, midwifery and obstetrics, are influenced by women requesting caesarean sections. The empirical material consists of semi-structured interviews with Swedish midwives (n=6) and obstetricians (n=6). Analysed through Tilly’s terms, the categorical pair and triad, midwife and obstetrician function as complementary categories in a triad with the women they encounter. Midwifery is a profession with connotations of closeness, understanding, and a unique connection to birth. It is challenged when women reject support or the idea of vaginal birth as empowering. Obstetrics, as a profession, relates to medical expertise, distance, and overview. It is challenged when their knowledge and authority are rejected. Both professions rely on each other’s complementary roles for support. The midwife draws on the obstetrician’s authority, while the obstetrician draws on the midwife’s empathic knowledge of the woman. When strongly challenged, they uphold their defined positions by questioning the woman’s judgement and rationality.
This article examines how healthcare professionals understand children with type 1 diabetes and their families, and how they consider them hard to reach. Based on observations and analysis of healthcare professionals’ case conferences, the article finds that families’ lack of compliance with professional recommendations is explained by parental lack of resources, ability, willingness, and complex social and personal problems of the family members. To find solutions to these diabetes management problems, the professionals integrate and synthesize knowledge based on experience, judgment, and practical skills. They also recognize organizational limitations of the healthcare system and, consequently, dependency on other organizations with other functions and knowledge. The article contributes to new knowledge about how organizations and professionals try to address and solve problems of health inequality in practice. A major finding is that the capacity to address individual health literacy depends just as much on organizational health literacy.
The significance of theoretical knowledge for professional practice is widely acknowledged, but how students in professional education construct meanings of their major subject remains understudied. This study examined how primary student teachers reflect on the role of educational science in their professional knowledge. Textual data were collected after their first practicum in a Finnish primary teacher education programme. Discourse analysis identified four discourses. In the discourse of depth, educational science enabled a thorough understanding of pupils. In the discourse of multifacetedness, simultaneous consideration of multiple aspects of teaching was evident. In the discourse of topicality, teachers could stay updated regarding the knowledge society through educational science. The discourse of systemicity underscored the contribution of educational science to societal progress. This study provides a better understanding of student teachers’ professional knowledge in curriculum development and programme design within teacher education.
This article explains professional misconduct through a boundary-centred ecological perspective. Although professions have historically justified their status and labour market privileges through social trusteeship and public service claims, numerous scandals—from Enron and Parmalat to the financial crisis and the opioid epidemic—reveal systematic failures of professional gatekeepers. I argue that these failures arise when boundaries within and around the system of professions are poorly designed or managed, particularly by being too weak, too strong, or too uncertain. These conditions generate mechanisms such as capture, conflicts of interest, collective myopia, double deontology, and regulatory arbitrage, leading to an increased likelihood of professional failure and misconduct. Contemporary trends such as globalisation, commercialisation, and technological change further destabilise traditional arrangements. The article concludes by advocating a configurational approach to boundary design to strengthen contemporary professional regulation.
This paper compares the status and qualities of different forms of expertise and distinguishes them from non-knowledge. It contrasts professional and scientific expertise with a less institutionalised and credentialed but increasingly prominent form: practical, experience-based “lay” or “citizen” expertise. Drawing on social studies of knowledge, expertise, science and the professions, the paper asks when expertise claims are reliable and how the value of experience-based claims can be assessed. Expertise is conceptualized pragmatically as specialized knowledge that provides orientation to others. While different forms of expertise may be provided by different actors, conveyed through different means and relevant in different contexts, they respond to shared validity standards: authoritative claims must be non-ubiquitous, problem-relevant, and advanced by trustworthy, impartial speakers with specialized capabilities. However, these standards must be translated into context- and knowledge-specific indicators. Assessing experience-based expertise is particularly challenging because conventional markers of epistemic authority are absent. The paper discusses two responses that build on professionalising, processing and certifying lay expertise, thereby partially transforming its character.
This study compares the working conditions and turnover intentions of professionals in Norwegian residential child protection institutions across public, for‑profit, and non‑profit ownership, using survey data from 870 professionals. Apart from work-family balance, professionals in for‑profit institutions report less favourable conditions across key risk dimensions—notably, weaker collegial support, lower‑quality professional leadership, and greater work pressure. Turnover intentions are significantly higher in for‑profit institutions, which is largely attributed to a more limited scope for professionalism. These findings are discussed in light of institutional theory. In sectors where organisations compete for users, investment in professional expertise may be a strategy to enhance attractiveness. By contrast, in contexts where users are allocated providers, as in residential child protection, competition for public contracts may incentivise cost-cutting, flexible staffing, and selective bids for target groups that place particular demands on staff—dynamics that potentially heighten work pressures while reducing investment in professional competence.
High school teachers’ professional commitment and passion are about being dedicated and unwavering in their pursuit of teaching excellence. This study aims to explore the antecedents of Norwegian high school teachers’ professional passion. We investigated three factors—relational trust, teachers’ affective commitment to the school organisation, and teachers’ instructional self-efficacy—by conducting a survey of 246 Norwegian high school teachers and using structural equation modelling. Our findings reveal a positive relationship between teachers’ self-efficacy and teachers’ professional passion, as well as a positive relationship between trust among teachers and their passion. Further, affective commitment to the school organisation is indirectly related to teacher passion via relational trust between teachers. We thus conclude that both teacher efficacy and trust between teachers are directly related to teachers’ passion, while teachers’ affective commitment to the school is indirectly related via relational trust. Implications for practice and further research are discussed.
Peer support services have been established in several professions to help individuals cope with challenging work and life situations. Using the medical profession as an example, we have qualitatively studied physicians’ experiences of peer support. We conducted interviews with 12 physicians shortly after they had attended peer support and 12 months later. We analysed the interviews using systematic text condensation. We then reanalysed each pair of interviews (baseline and follow-up) using Schein’s model to further deepen the analytical insights. The results show that the professional medical role can evolve. Peer support helped the individual physician to become aware of, acknowledge and adjust to how unwritten rules within the medical culture had formed a non-sustainable professional role. Peer support can facilitate changes at and outside work, as well as foster a willingness to seek treatment for self-care.
Professionalism is a crucial element of curricula in many profession-oriented higher education programmes. However, defining and working with professionalism-oriented learning objectives can be challenging. Comparative perspectives on professionalism across educational contexts are often missing. This study explores educators’ ideas on what students need to learn to effectively navigate and manage their professional practice within three professional education programmes: police, medical, and social work. The analysis captures how professionalism is portrayed in documents and interviews with teachers. The findings highlight shared ideas of professionalism across educational boundaries. The concept is described as multi-dimensional and complex, necessitating more communication about what can be expected of students and how teaching and assessment should be designed.
This article illustrates how clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are integrated into clinical reasoning and affect decision-making processes in emergency medical services (EMS). CDSS aims to assist clinical reasoning with relevant patient information and medical knowledge, facilitating decision-making. As CDSS become increasingly significant in Swedish healthcare, understanding their implementation is critical, particularly as technological innovations may reshape clinical reasoning and professionals’ decision-making. The study draws on empirical data from observations and interviews with registered nurses (RNs) in a simulation project. Findings illustrate how clinical reasoning is a collective process among colleagues and how emotions and tacit knowledge are central to professional judgment. Although RNs express confidence in technical systems assisting clinical reasoning, they remain skeptical in situations requiring compromises to their judgment based on CDSS outputs. Finally, the article problematizes the effects on RNs when working with unsynchronized or insufficiently functioning technical systems.
