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Agency at Work pp 121–140Cite as

Agency, Learning and Knowledge Work: Epistemic Dilemmas in Professional Practices

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Part of the book series: Professional and Practice-based Learning ((PPBL,volume 20))

Abstract

The nature of professional work is changing. In particular, relationships between professionals and the people work are being reforged in more complex formations. Partnership approaches to services for families with young children are among the historically new work practices that are part of a broader shift towards coproduction. Working in partnership with parents places a particular set of demands on practitioners, including engaging in distinctive forms of relational work and developing new kinds of expertise. Less well understood is what such changes mean in terms of the ways professionals in such settings need to develop and exercise agency as a regular, but nonroutine, part of their work. This chapter draws on an ethnographic study of a parent education service in Sydney (Australia), casting light on agentic responses to a series of epistemic dilemmas that professionals encounter in practice. Adopting a cultural-historical approach, it works with concepts of the object, activity, motive, and practice in dialectic relation with one another. Analysis focuses on handover between professionals as an artefact of practice in which professionals do knowledge work, inflecting ‘Where to?’ questions with agentic and epistemic considerations of ‘How do we get there?’ The account provided here enriches cultural-historical understandings of agency in the context of professional work, offering an expanded description of responses to epistemic dilemmas in practice.

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Acknowledgements

Nick is Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch. The empirical data collection was conducted as part of a study funded by a UTS Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. The analysis and theoretical work presented here has been completed as part of a study funded by the Australian Research Council, project number DE150100365. The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of Teena Clerke, a Research Associate on both projects. Nick would also like to thank the staff and families involved at Karitane’s residential unit in Carramar, Sydney.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, University of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW, 2007, Australia

    Nick Hopwood

  2. University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Nick Hopwood

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  1. Nick Hopwood
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Correspondence to Nick Hopwood .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Michael Goller

  2. University of Jyväskylä , Jyväskylä, Finland

    Susanna Paloniemi

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Hopwood, N. (2017). Agency, Learning and Knowledge Work: Epistemic Dilemmas in Professional Practices. In: Goller, M., Paloniemi, S. (eds) Agency at Work. Professional and Practice-based Learning, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60943-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60943-0_7

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