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What is the vision for this profession? Learning environments of health visitors in an English city

What is the vision for this profession? Learning environments of health visitors in an English city
What is the vision for this profession? Learning environments of health visitors in an English city
This paper discusses the attempts by a group of health visitors in a provincial English city to reform their working practices in order to work more collaboratively and, hence, create a more expansive learning environment. The health visitors self-consciously sought to create a ‘community of practice’, a term they felt captured their ambition to move away from the historical conception of health visitors as professionals
working largely on their own but under the direction of others. The paper shows that the outcomes of the health visitors’ attempts to engineer changes to their work organisation were shaped by the constraints and opportunities offered by their relationships with a diverse and fragmented network of fellow professionals, including other health visitors, doctors,
managers and personnel from other social care agencies. Our analysis contextualises the uncertain development of discretion and trust in the work organization of health visitors within the broader horizontal and vertical relationships of the productive system in which they are embedded. The paper argues that, whilst much was achieved and considerable learning took place, the group’s vision was ultimately unsustainable due to the characteristics of the wider productive system.
14
Cardiff School of Social Sciences
Jewson, Nick
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Unwin, Lorna
8203040c-b1e8-4948-bc2e-4bb2db648720
Felstead, Alan
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Fuller, Alison
c6b47796-05b5-4548-b67e-2ca2f2010fef
Kakavelakis, Konstantinos
d0a26962-968e-448c-94c0-3a5f2087ad5a
Jewson, Nick
f96f4be3-d026-4140-9c81-265d74aab544
Unwin, Lorna
8203040c-b1e8-4948-bc2e-4bb2db648720
Felstead, Alan
514e6ef7-2443-49aa-883e-706911d9191d
Fuller, Alison
c6b47796-05b5-4548-b67e-2ca2f2010fef
Kakavelakis, Konstantinos
d0a26962-968e-448c-94c0-3a5f2087ad5a

Jewson, Nick, Unwin, Lorna, Felstead, Alan, Fuller, Alison and Kakavelakis, Konstantinos (2008) What is the vision for this profession? Learning environments of health visitors in an English city (Learning as Work Research Paper, 14) Cardiff, Wales. Cardiff School of Social Sciences 30pp.

Record type: Monograph (Working Paper)

Abstract

This paper discusses the attempts by a group of health visitors in a provincial English city to reform their working practices in order to work more collaboratively and, hence, create a more expansive learning environment. The health visitors self-consciously sought to create a ‘community of practice’, a term they felt captured their ambition to move away from the historical conception of health visitors as professionals
working largely on their own but under the direction of others. The paper shows that the outcomes of the health visitors’ attempts to engineer changes to their work organisation were shaped by the constraints and opportunities offered by their relationships with a diverse and fragmented network of fellow professionals, including other health visitors, doctors,
managers and personnel from other social care agencies. Our analysis contextualises the uncertain development of discretion and trust in the work organization of health visitors within the broader horizontal and vertical relationships of the productive system in which they are embedded. The paper argues that, whilst much was achieved and considerable learning took place, the group’s vision was ultimately unsustainable due to the characteristics of the wider productive system.

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Published date: April 2008

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 63793
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/63793
PURE UUID: f4795cc3-8ccc-42b5-9989-58df4ead0521

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Date deposited: 04 Nov 2008
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 11:43

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Contributors

Author: Nick Jewson
Author: Lorna Unwin
Author: Alan Felstead
Author: Alison Fuller
Author: Konstantinos Kakavelakis

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