"What’s the vision for this profession?” Learning environments of health visitors in an English city

Jewson, Nick, Unwin, Lorna, Felstead, Alan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8851-4289, Fuller, Alison and Kakavelakis, Konstantinos 2008. "What’s the vision for this profession?” Learning environments of health visitors in an English city. [Working Paper]. Learning as Work Research Paper, vol. 14. Cardiff: Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. Available at: http://learningaswork.cf.ac.uk/outputs/Working_Pap...

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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.

Item Type:	Monograph (Working Paper)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Published
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Publisher:	Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	19 Oct 2022 10:25
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/24342

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