Many public and non-profit services are delivered by organizations that work in-between public and private regimes. They combine multiple logics (performance, professional and political logics), each bringing together competing objectives, values and practices, aimed at generating immediate results, intelligence and integrity. These services are also hybrid because professionals who actually render services must combine these organizational contexts with strong occupational contexts, in which they have been trained and socialized, in which they form identities and are held accountable. Such professional environments are also about performances, professionalism and politics, albeit in different ways and with different meanings.
Medical professionals, for example, not only work in hybrid organizations such as hospitals; they also work in occupational fields, which try to connect medical professional action to professional codes, guidelines and standards. They want to act professionally, but they also want to perform and serve society; they want to strengthen professional autonomies, but also solve problems for patients, and enhance professional authority.
As a consequence, professionals must have the ability to deal with dual hybridity, i.e. with organizational/occupational hybridity in hybrid service organizations. This paper focuses on whether and how professionals are equipped to cope. We combine insights on hybrid services, professionalism and coping behavior to study professional capabilities. We rely upon recent debates on ‘hybrid professionalism’ and ‘organizing professionalism’ to contribute to theorizing that goes beyond distinctions and dichotomies. Instead of juxtaposing ‘performance versus professionalism’ as well as ‘organizational versus occupational’, we stress the rise of connective professionalism, in which professional capabilities are a matter of the connections that professionals are able to make.
Contemporary professional action is not so much strong and authoritative because (medical) professionals have appropriate guidelines and standards, nor because (medical) managers are able to manage professionals in appropriate ways. It is strong and authoritative because professionals are able to connect themselves to colleagues, managers, clients and stakeholders, who operate in different arenas. Although this is increasingly happening, in professional fields such as the medical field, backed by medical education, it is underdeveloped, because the classic imagery of ‘pure’ and ‘passionate’ professionals is difficult to change.
In this paper, we identity the conditions that characterize the development of new professional capabilities, and we sketch implications. We illustrate this by presenting illustrative case material of changing forms of professionalism, situated within hybrid organizational contexts such as hospitals, schools and universities.
CONNECTIVE_PROFESSIONALISM_Noordegraaf_March_2018_paper_IRSPM_2018_Edinburgh_April.pdf 