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The role of common knowledge in achieving collaboration across practices

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Abstract

Working across practice boundaries on complex societal problems is now commonplace. Yet we know relatively little about what enables it to happen successfully. One analytic challenge for studies of inter-professional work is to understand what mediates collaboration across the boundaries of practices so that what matters for each practice is still in play in the judgements that are made. The argument in this article is that attention should be paid to how what matters for each potentially collaborating practitioner is brought to bear on both interpreting and responding to work problems. Using the analytic resources of cultural–historical theory, three conceptual tools are presented. These tools, relational expertise, relational agency and common knowledge, are the outcome of analyses of inter-professional work in studies in England over the last ten years. They are offered as resources for both the analysis and development of cross-practice collaborations. The article presents evidence from three recent studies of creating the conditions for inter-professional collaborations in children's services to examine the construction and use of common knowledge as a resource for those tasked with service integration. Common knowledge is seen as comprising the motives that take forward each contributing practice. It is woven into continuously contestable organisational narratives. These mediate interactions across practice boundaries and give strategic direction to activities in and across services which are in the process of integration.

Introduction

I recently spent an afternoon walking around villages in rural France with an architect who had been involved in their restoration over several decades. His passion for stonework, sight lines and field systems was compelling. We visitors became engrossed, seeing things we had never previously noticed, finding new meanings in the familiar and trying to make connections with what we already knew about the local history. Some of us did not agree with his view that good restoration should be invisible, but we recognised his passion about what mattered for him and the expertise that he made explicit as he talked us through the processes of rebuilding. His expertise came from engagement in practices which were culturally formed with specific histories and values. However, he became anguished when recounting the problems he had with town planners. It was clear that when an architect tries to work with a town planner, what matters for each of them may not easily align, intentions get thwarted and frustrations result.

It is what happens at the intersection of practices and the alignment of motives at these sites of intersection that are the core concerns of this article. The intention is to “delve into the miasma of the collective” as I once put it (Edwards, 2009a, Edwards, 2009b, p. 202) in order to better understand the interactions that comprise collaborative inter-professional responses to complex problems. The focus is therefore the middle layer of analysis between the system and the individual and in particular the expertise which is exercised in relationships where specialist knowledge and skills are mobilised.

The arguments offered are framed by a cultural historical understanding of practices, activities and actions, where practices are seen as historically accumulated, knowledge-laden, emotionally freighted and given direction by what is valued by those who inhabit them (Edwards, 2010). What matters most for practitioners mediates their identities as they take part in activities such as helping parents navigate the social care system, in practices such as social work. In these contexts, what matters orients their interpretations and responses as they tackle the problems they encounter in work activities. Emotion, as Dreyfus (2004) has observed, is therefore recognised as an element in expert decision-making.

The analyses of interactions between expert practitioners that have led to the conceptual developments outlined in this paper have taken place in children's services in local authorities in England, at a time when efforts have been underway to build strong horizontal links between specialist practices. These services, such as social work and educational psychology, are currently reconfiguring their relationships with each other in order to offer seamless responses to the changing and often complex needs of vulnerable children and their families. The studies include a national evaluation of a government initiative aimed at promoting inter-professional work (Edwards, Barnes, Plewis, Morris, et al., 2006); research council funded studies Learning in and for Interagency Working (LIW) (Edwards, Daniels, Gallagher, Leadbetter, & Warmington, 2009) and how schools work with other agencies to prevent social exclusion (PSE) (Edwards, Lunt, & Stamou, 2010); a recent examination of knowledge mobilisation in children's services entitled Developing Interagency Working (DIW) (Edwards & Daniels, 2012); and two studies on leadership in children's services (Canwell et al., 2011, Daniels and Edwards, in press).

The changes we studied reflect broader policy moves towards joined-up government over the last decade, suggesting that findings from children's services will have wider resonance. Mulgan has pointed to some of the challenges of the policy shift to networks and projects and away from “traditional structures” (2005, p. 179). These include the need for “horizontal structures [which] are essential to complement vertical ones” (p.184), and notes that ensuing erosions of autonomy are “almost certainly to be resisted” (p. 187). I suggest that Mulgan is half right about structures and he is certainly correct about resistance.

The studies just listed lead to my point of departure: that creating new horizontally linking structures is not a sufficient response to these new demands, not least because of the ensuing resistance. Instead, attention needs to be paid to the work that is done to create fluid and responsive horizontal linkages between practices. Christensen and Laegreid (2007) get closer to the line I shall pursue. Horizontal working, they argue, needs ‘cooperative effort and cannot be easily imposed from the top down’ so that “The role of a successful reform agent is to operate more as a gardener than as an engineer or an architect” (Christensen & Laegreid, 2007,p. 1063). In this article I outline the development of some new gardening tools — relational expertise, common knowledge, and relational agency. I then discuss how creating common knowledge of what matters in each practice has emerged as a crucial resource for those who are making the shift to more horizontal linkages.

Section snippets

A cultural historical view of expertise

A cultural–historical account of expertise is based in the Vygotskian view of learning as a process of internalisation and externalisation, during which people reconfigure their relationships with the practices they inhabit. Importantly, learning or developing expertise in a practice is not a neutral process: it involves a dialectical engagement in activities where what matters for people as individuals is highlighted by them as they interpret and respond to the tasks they encounter.

Here

Knowledge and motives in practices

The distributed nature of expertise in multi-professional children's services turns attention to how knowledge is mobilised across practices. Nowotny points to the dangers of aiming at the mere distribution of expertise because it might lead to a diluted form of hybridity. She sees diffused expertise as a potential problem because people can believe that the knowledge that seeps across boundaries is expert knowledge. Here Nowotny echoes our concerns in the PSE study about unqualified welfare

Relational expertise and common knowledge

Relational expertise involves recognising what engrosses others, taking their standpoint and mutually aligning motives so that engagement continues (Edwards, 2010, Edwards, 2011). This definition highlights the motives that are to be found in the knowledge that matters in different practices whether family networks for social workers or curriculum for teachers. These very different conceptual tools for interpreting a child's trajectory as a Leont'evian object of activity could impede taking the

Agency and mediated action

Judgement in professional practices involves personal agency in interpreting problems, responding and then evaluating actions and outcomes. Inter-professional collaborations, however, call for the exercise of relational agency which, as I have explained elsewhere (Edwards, 2005, Edwards, 2009b, Edwards, 2010) is a capacity that can emerge in a two stage process within a constant dynamic as people engage together in activities. It involves:

  • (i)

    working with others to expand the object of activity so

Conceptual work and Vygotskian research

The creation of relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency as conceptual gardening tools, which can both analyse and work on horizontal linkages across practices, has been a Vygotskian quest. Vygotsky before his death in 1934 was preoccupied with what he termed the crisis in psychology (Vygotsky, 1987). For him the problem lay with the discipline's distance from the field and from its lack of reflective awareness of the theoretical frameworks it used. Vygotsky's own work was

The research

The discussion will draw on three studies undertaken within 18 months in 2010–2012. During this period senior leaders in children's services in England were charged with bringing together separate services such as social work and educational psychology so that they could work together to understand the complexity of a child's trajectory towards risk and to respond to it. Their leadership task therefore involved enabling people from different professions, with no history of common knowledge, to

Concluding discussion

The ideas discussed here reflect a Vygotskian endeavour of staying close to practice in order to test and fine-tune conceptual tools that can be used to understand and work on the world. The ideas of relational expertise, relational agency and, in particular, common knowledge are offered tentatively as tools to be worked on and with by others as they take them into different fields to both analyse and develop collaborations between practices.

The recognition of common knowledge as a resource

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