When strategies of inter-collaboration put professional identities under pressure

Abstract

In this article, the author investigates how strategies of inter-professional collaboration affect professional identity within the health and social-work area. The aim is to contribute to a broad discussion of the impact of inter-professional education and collaboration as a discourse of contemporary Danish welfare state policy. When seen as a policy of the state, this strategy is named ‘inter-collaboration’. Strategies of inter-collaboration emerge as policy from different institutions. These strategies describe and introduce, for instance, specific models for education and professional work in practice. The article takes nurses and social workers as its case and investigates how these strategies are transformed at institutional level in order to manage the area of health and social care. The theoretical approach is based on the theory of practice, trilogy of habitus and field theory from Pierre Bourdieu. From this starting point, methods are developed to analyze public administration documents. That construction is made to show, on one hand, the mental structures and, on the other, the different institutional positions as well as how their relations frame a social practice. The document-analysis identifies various institutions as producers of different arguments supporting inter-collaboration. The institutions interpret the strategies of inter-collaboration as a way to maintain or improve their present position. However, strategies of inter-collaboration seem to introduce new, mental structures and possible transformations in professional identity and work routines within the health- and social area because they re-frame institutional comprehension. A further discussion of possible consequences of this impact does not give a clear answer to the investigation. Yet, it points to the ambiguity in how strategies of inter-collaboration affect the nurses and social workers’ professional identity by putting the traditional identity, which is closely related to humanitarian values and principles of solidarity, under pressure and thereby lead to a re- or de-professionalization.