Multi-professional teamwork in human services

Purpose This paper investigates the prospects and difficulties of multi-professional teamwork in human services from a professional identity perspective. The purpose of this paper is to explore the mutual interplay between professional identity formation and team activities. Design/methodology/approach This is a process study of two cases of multi-professional teamwork in family care. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with team members and managers. The analysis follows a stepwise approach alternating between the individual and team levels. Findings In showing the mutual interplay between teamwork processes and individual identity formation, the study contributes knowledge on professional identity formation of mature professionals; in particular showing how unique individual identification processes have different consequences for multi-professional team activities. Further, alternative shapes of interplay between individual identity formation and team-level processes are identified. Research limitations/implications Despite the fact that the sample is small and that collaboration intensity was relatively low, the paper succeeds in conceptualising the links between professional identity formation and multi-professional teamwork. Practical implications In managing multi-professional teams, team composition and the team's early developments seem determining for whether the team will reach its collaborative intentions. Originality/value This paper is original in its exploration of the ongoing interplay between individual identity formation and multi-professional team endeavours. Further, the paper contributes knowledge on mature professionals' identity formation, particularly concerning individual variation within and between professional groups.

Aging Adventure Athletes Assess Achievements and Alter Aspirations to Maintain Self-Esteem

Achievements and capabilities influence the self-esteem of skilled adventure athletes. Self-esteem affects individual mental health. Aging commonly reduces adventure capabilities. To avoid loss in self-esteem, aging adventure athletes are forced to adjust their aspirations. Here, I examine this process using participant observation, ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches. The qualitative data for this analysis are derived from 60 years’ experience in outdoor adventure activities, and ∼30,000 person-hours of participant observation. I argue that individuals assess their own capabilities against a set of specific feats. For some activities, successful completion of a specific feat is known as nailing it. The selection of these feats depends on factors such as activity and geographic location, as well as individual experience and peer comparisons. I examine the detailed process using a single feat repeated over a period of decades, the bubble-line kayak run through Lava Falls on the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. I compare other examples of nail or fail to construct a general framework for self-esteem in aging adventure athletes, with both physical and psychological feedback loops. I also identify two key thresholds, as aging adventure athletes recognize their declining skills. These may apply to aging more broadly, beyond outdoor adventure.

Give and you shall receive: investing in the careers of women professionals

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to explore what organizations can do to facilitate the retention and advancement of women professionals into top leadership positions. A social exchange framework is applied to examine ways organizations can signal support for and investment in the careers of women professionals, and ultimately the long-term work relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

– This paper employed a qualitative methodology; specifically, semi-structured interviews with 20 women executives, in primarily the US hospitality industry, were conducted. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and content analyzed.

Findings

– Organizations are likely to strengthen the retention of their female professionals if they signal support through purposeful, long-term career development that provides a sightline to the top, and ultimately creates more female role models in senior-level positions. Organizations can also signal support through offering autonomy over how work is completed, and designing infrastructures of support to sustain professionals during mid-career stages. Findings are used to present a work-exchange model of career development.

Research limitations/implications

– This research is an exploratory study that is limited in its scope and generalizability.

Practical implications

– The proposed work-exchange model can be used to comprehensively structures initiatives that would signal organizational support to – and long-term investment in – female professionals and enable them to develop their career paths within their organizations.

Originality/value

– Through offering a work-exchange model of career development, this paper identifies components of organizational support from a careers perspective, and highlights the factors that could potentially contribute to long-term growth and retention of women professionals.

Configurable Bureaucracy and the Making of Modular Man

The flexibility of people in modern societies rests upon their capacity to divide themselves into separate modules of thought and action, and deploy them in ways that fit their purposes. The practice of ‘informatizing’ work by converting tasks into software-based processes entails the modular design of work, because software has a modular form. We use the concept of modularity to analyse the implications of informatization in the empirical context of a ‘shared service centre’ providing professional services. We make three contributions. First, informatization enlarges the scope for organizational flexibility, because the organization can be treated as a configuration of modules which can be reshuffled to suit changing circumstances. Second, employees must attempt to deploy enhanced modular capabilities, by executing any given set of processes, in a flexible, unemotional and time-efficient fashion. Third, given the ability to informatize complex service work, and the existence of organizational templates which accommodate it, the modular design and management of other services may become more common.

Work: Four Worlds and Ways of Seeing

Organizations are spaces and places of work. In this introductory essay to the Special Issue of Organization Studies dedicated to ‘Worlds of Work’, we lay out our vision for placing the study of work and workers back at the centre of organization studies. We advance four inter-related work-world metaphors or ways of seeing organizations: as physical worlds, as worlds of hierarchy, as spaces of innovation, and as fields of actors. Research that puts work at the centre of organizational analysis, and places organization within its context of economy, politics and society, will provide important new insights into the experience of work and nature of contemporary organization. Such an agenda will be founded on both a recognition of the socially constructed nature of these phenomena and their dialectics, tracing how these tensions play out in new and hybrid forms.

The Power of Diversity Discourses at Work: On the Interlocking Nature of Diversities and Occupations

Drawing on Fairclough’s comprehensive social theory of discourse as text, social practice and discursive practice, the paper examines how discourses of diversity are implicated in the power dynamics in the Belgian branch of an international automobile company. Our analysis shows how diversity discourses are interlocked with occupations. On the one hand, speakers’ occupational practices are conditional for the emergence of multiple, occupation-distinct discourses of diversity. On the other, in their discursive practice, speakers not only construct diversity but at once deploy it as a symbolic currency to reaffirm their own occupational practices and related subject positions warranting voice in the workplace. Our study contributes to the extant critical diversity literature and the organizational scholarship on work by showing how the power dynamics of diversity cannot be adequately conceptualized without attending to occupational discursive and non-discursive practices.

Enchanting Work: New Spirits of Service Work in an Organic Supermarket

Drawing from a qualitative, empirical study of work experiences in a North American organic supermarket, we introduce the notion of ‘enchanting work’, a polyvalent concept referring to the aura found in certain forms of service work in contrast to the disenchantment commonly associated with it. Enchanting work, because of its unique stance vis-a-vis workplace critique and commitment, can inform the study of work by moving beyond the dichotomy of meaningful versus alienated work. Our findings show how enchanting work can be found on three different levels to (1) infuse otherwise mundane work processes with meaning, (2) obscure organizational control mechanisms and divert attention from precarious work conditions, and (3) recruit the participation of workers for creating an enchanted workplace. We discuss the implications of our results for understanding contemporary worlds of work and explore both the emancipatory and ideological ramifications of enchanting work.