Professional Responsibility and Professionalism ─ A Sociomaterial Examination

Responsibility and professionalism are increasingly issues of concern for professional associations, employers and educators alike. When bad things happen, professionals are often held personally accountable for complex situations.Professional Responsibility and Professionalism advances our approaches to professional responsibility from individual-centred, virtue-based prescriptions towards understanding and responding effectively to the multi-faceted challenges encountered today by professionals working in dynamic complexity. The author applies a sociomaterial examination to specific examples drawn from different professional contexts of practice. She examines important implications for what professional responsibility and accountability might mean individually and collectively, and what it might be becoming when demands increasingly conflict, and when we accept that capacities for action are performed into existence in emergent and precarious webs of both human and nonhuman forces.

The chapters explore some of the most prominent questions in professional responsibility, including:

• What does professional responsibility, and accountability, mean in the escalating complexities and conflicts confronting today’s professionals?

• How does professional responsibility become developed and enacted, and through what social and material entanglements?

• How should responsibility be determined in multi-agency and interprofessional practice?

• What happens when professional decisions are delegated to software algorithms and diagnostic instruments?

• How are new governing regimes of professional work, such as innovation imperatives, excessive audit, and logics of blame and scapegoating, reconfiguring responsibility?

• How can professionals respond simultaneously to individuals in need, obligations of their profession, demands of their employer, and an anxious society?

A major concern addressed by each chapter and the book as a whole is educating professionals in and for responsibility. Specific dilemmas and strategies are offered for educators in universities, workplaces and professional development contexts who seek new approaches to helping professionals learn to critically understand and practice responsibility today.

This book will appeal to a wide audience of education researchers and post-graduate students studying professional practice, professionalism and education across a wide range of disciplines. Health professions, professionals working in private practices, such as law, architecture and engineering, newer professions such as social work and policing, and educational professions at all levels will find stories and strategies reflecting key issues of their practice in this detailed exploration of professional responsibility and accountability.

Tara Fenwick is Professor of Education at the University of Stirling in the UK, and Director ofProPEL, international network for research in Professional Practice, Education and Learning.