Introduction

Most professional interactions involve relational work, sometimes visibly and sometimes hidden. It is explicitly part of the interactions of business consultants with their clients (Lambrechts et al., Reference Lambrechts, Grieten, Bouwen and Corthouts2009); but is often invisible in the attention to the other that marks the caring professions (De Frino, Reference De Frino2009). It is frequently regarded as a kind of backstage way of lubricating working relationships (Fletcher, Reference Fletcher2001); and is increasingly and overtly recognised as a secret of successful leadership (Helstad & Møller, Reference Helstad and Møller2013). Yet, despite the growing interest in the relational aspects of getting work done, as these examples show, it is usually seen as a resource for taking forwards one’s particular intentions as a practitioner. In this book, the focus on working together is slightly different.

All the contributors are interested in how different specialist expertise is brought to bear on both interpreting and responding to a complex problem. Joint interpretations are crucial to ensure that as much of the complexity as possible is revealed and the best resources available are used to work on it. This book is therefore about collaboration, mainly across practice boundaries, to reveal and respond to complexity. It is not about heroic boundary crossing, but is about how practitioners are able to contribute their own specialist expertise to work on difficult problems alongside the expertise offered by others, including clients and potential users of research. It is also deeply ethical as it allows for creative responses that stem from what is important for each individual, at the same time connecting people dialogically to each other and to a common good by, in Taylor’s terms, by “bind[ing] us to others” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1991, p. 67).

Collaboration comes in many forms. It includes the alignment of effort involved in moving a heavy piece of furniture; the interdependency of a football team; and the quick response of emergency services to a road accident. It is often embedded in everyday rituals such as clearing the dinner table; telling a bedtime story with a young child; or packing the car for a weekend away. What all these interactions have in common is a sense of mutuality, an alertness to what the other person is likely to do and an awareness of why he or she might do it. Yet these capacities are often invisible until their lack causes problems, the piano falls or no one packs the picnic.

In this collection, researchers from across the world show how they have made capacities for relational work visible in a wide variety of settings, from family support services to globally distributed networks in the technology field. The practitioners in each research site have been tackling problems that require more than one kind of specialist expertise where, for example, early educators work with dentists and doctors in hospitals, or researchers negotiate projects with research participants. In explaining how these collaborations are accomplished, the authors have, in different ways, drawn on three ideas: relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency.

These concepts arose and have been developed in my own work on interprofessional collaboration over the last fifteen years (Edwards, Reference Edwards2005; Reference Edwards2010, Reference Edwards2011, Reference Edwards2012; Edwards et al., Reference Edwards, Daniels, Gallagher, Leadbetter and Warmington2009). In this collection, the authors take the concepts further, refining and refashioning them in use in their projects within and across different national settings and policy discourses. For those of us who work with the Vygotskian legacy of cultural-historical theory, observing how conceptual tools are refined in use is utterly fascinating. Consequently, the book has two aims: the first is to demonstrate the usefulness of these conceptual tools when deployed for different purposes in research and in development projects; the second is to capture how they have been refined as they have been used. Let us therefore start by outlining the origins of the three conceptual tools in the work of both Vygotsky and his colleague, A. N. Leont’ev.

Vygotsky, Tool Use and Practice

For Vygotsky, concepts were tools that have cultural origins and that are used in ways that are valued in the culture. Over time, we learn to use these tools in order to work on the world and make it a better place. His was a distinctly modernist agenda, arising in Russia during the 1920s. He saw psychology and education as a means of individual liberation and the route to a modern and successful society; the more robust the conceptual tools at the disposal of citizens and the better they were able to use them, the more effective they would be in taking society forward (Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky, Rieber and Carton1987, Reference Vygotsky1997).

The Vygotskian researcher is therefore interested in the use and development of conceptual tools. We can follow this interest in two ways. If we are concerned with how well someone understands an existing practice, such as mathematics or social work, we can examine how they use the concepts that are valued in that practice. We can follow their actions, in activities, in the practice and perhaps ask them to reflect with us on why they worked in a particular way. If, however, the practice is new or changing, we may become interested in how existing concepts are refashioned in use and how new concepts arise as the new forms of work are undertaken. We still follow actions in activities, but these activities may not be in existing practices but in newly forming ones. Here the researcher focuses on what these new concepts are, whether they have only local relevance, or if they can be labeled and tested in other settings to assess their wider currency. If they can be made visible and tested, can they also be used to inform and develop the new ways of working?

While the first approach helps us primarily to understand human learning, the second line of enquiry also leads us towards conceptual clarification in relation to new forms of work and changes in and across practices. The ideas to be discussed in this collection fall into the second category. So let us do a little more conceptual ground clearing before discussing them in detail.

The chapters all focus on work, what people do as practitioners. The practices that experts inhabit, and their motives as they work in these practices, therefore feature across the contributions. The term practice has a distinctive meaning in the collection of chapters. Practices are seen as ‘knowledge-laden, imbued with cultural values, and emotionally freighted by the motives of those who already act in them’ (Edwards, Reference Edwards2010, p. 5). They are inhabited by practitioners, are usually historically formed and sustain relatively stable professional identities through a dynamic of person and practice. The values and motives that are carried in practices provide the emotional glue that holds together professional identities, and these identities in turn mediate or shape how practitioners navigate and achieve mastery in these practices. But people are not merely products of the practices they find themselves in; they are agentic and have commitments. Archer puts it succinctly: ‘… we are who we are because of what we care about’ (Archer, Reference Archer2000, p. 10). Enacting expertise is therefore very tightly connected with what matters to people in the actions they take in the practices they inhabit, whether that is sustaining the family network in social work or maintaining the school attendance of a vulnerable child in teaching.

I shall be mainly using the term what matters rather than motive in this chapter, partly because the word motive has come to be associated with individual needs, but also because of the connection Taylor makes with recognising what matters and a sense of authenticity in one’s actions and identity. He argues: ‘I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters’ (Taylor, Reference Taylor1991, p. 40). To eliminate these demands would, he argues, create a trivial version of identity.

A cultural-historical approach to motive is based in a collective notion of what matters to others as well as oneself within a particular practice. Its roots lie in the work of Leont’ev, who offered a different way of thinking about motive. The terminology he uses when discussing motive, object of activity and object motive, was an important element in his efforts to overcome what he saw as a dualistic psychology that separated motives and societal conditions. His dialectical premise was therefore similar to the line taken by Taylor, arguing that ‘society produces the activity of the individuals forming it’ (Leont’ev, Reference 21Leont’ev1978a, p. 7). But he has helped us to operationalise the dynamic when working in the field. The key to the dialectic between people and activity in society was what he termed the ‘object of activity’, what it is people are working on.

His thesis was that the dialectic of person in activity in society gives rise to the object motive, which in turn directs the participation of the actors in activities. He explained object motive, somewhat opaquely, as follows: ‘The main thing that distinguishes one activity from another, however, is the difference in their objects. It is exactly the object of activity that gives it a determined direction. According to the terminology I have proposed, the object of activity is its true motive’ (Leont’ev, Reference 21Leont’ev1978a, p. 17).

Let’s unpack this statement and take as an example a goal of reshaping a child’s trajectory to shift it away from risk of harm to safety and social inclusion. The object of activity, what is being worked on, will be the child’s trajectory, but it will be seen differently by practitioners from different practices. The social worker will perhaps work on strengthening the family and the teacher on the child’s school attendance. These foci of attention are different aspects of the child’s trajectory and they are selected by each practitioner according to what matters for them in their specialist practice. That is, each facet of the object of activity, family networks or attendance, contains within it the professional motives of the practitioners who are acting on it.

Two things are happening here. First, the understanding of the trajectory is being expanded so that more of its complexity can be seen. This expansion is valuable because the teacher can’t easily tackle attendance if she is not aware of problems at home. Second, we begin to see how what matters for each practitioner is objectified, and what matters for a profession becomes part of the object of activity. Leont’ev explained this process of objectification as a dialectic of person and object of activity: ‘The object of activity is twofold: first in its independent existence as subordinating to itself and transforming the activity of the subject; second, as an image of the object, as a product of its property of psychological reflection that is realized as an activity of the subject and cannot exist otherwise’ (Leont’ev, Reference 21Leont’ev1978a, p. 7).

This dialectic of person with object of activity in the responsive work done by professionals, such as social workers and teachers, recognises the extent to which their nonroutine work involves doing knowledge work, working on the object of activity to reshape it by using their professional knowledge and expertise. It is no surprise that Leont’ev refers to the connection that Marx made between cognition and practice when writing about the object of activity:

However, Leont’ev’s notion of the object of activity that not only objectifies what it is that is worked on in an activity, but also the needs, emotions and feelings associated with it, takes Marx’s focus on practices much further. First, it recognises that objects of activity exhibit motivating forces. Second, it reminds us that the relationship between person and object of activity is never direct but is always mediated by what matters in a practice.

I have already begun to indicate that practices are made up of activities and that the actions that people take in the activities are shaped by their sense of who they are as a social worker or teacher. For example, social work will consist of several activities, family case conferences, home visits, writing statements for magistrates’ courts and so on, and the way these activities are accomplished will be shaped by the training received by the social worker, the priorities of her team and her personal professional values.

This example returns to Leont’ev’s concern with articulating the relationship between motivated actions and societal conditions. Hedegaard has addressed these concerns using Leont’ev’s attention to object motive, to produce a way of framing the potential linkages between societal conditions, practices, activities and actions. Figure 1.1 is just one version of the framework, which is under continuous development. It is presented here as potential planes of analysis. It is a way of guiding a research focus without losing sight of, for example, how activities are located in practices that mediate national or regional policies and provide constraints and affordances for individual actions within activities. There may not be alignment between what the political economy is requiring, what matters in a team or organisation’s practice, how work activities are interpreted and accomplished, what people do and why they do it. This framework therefore also offers a useful way of revealing these differences and pointing to the need to analyse how they are negotiated by actors.

Figure 1.1. Planes of analysis (after Hedegaard, Reference Hedegaard, Hedegaard, Edwards and Fleer2012).

Hedegaard is a developmental psychologist with an interest in both learning and development. This framework is based in the Vygotskian view of learning, which allows us to see that an activity in an activity setting, such as doing homework, will offer a child a potential situation for learning, but doesn’t guarantee it. Learning will occur only through a dialectic in which the child recognises and engages intentionally with the demands inherent in the activity. Although the framework was originally designed to explain how children act intentionally at home and school (Hedegaard & Fleer, Reference Hedegaard and Fleer2008), it is also useful for designing studies of professional work and has been used in several studies over the last few years as the basis of a reflective tool for practitioners (Edwards, Reference Edwards2015).

One reason for introducing Figure 1.1 is because it shows just how difficult it is for people to collaborate across practice boundaries. Intentional professional action is usually bound up in activities that are shaped by institutional interpretations of regional/national/international priorities. Addressing complex problems requires actors to sustain their specific expertise and what matters for them as professionals in order to use them when interpreting and responding to the problem.

While studying work at the boundaries between professions, it became clear to me that the most successful work occurred not through boundary crossing, such as placing a social worker in a school, but in work at sites of intersecting practices. These sites were not always places. They could be virtual networks or scheduled meetings, but they were task-focussed, working on the needs of a child, family or neighbourhood. As I tried to make sense of what led to successful task accomplishment, despite the pull of professional identities so firmly located within specific practices, I began to see the exercise of a form of expertise that augmented, but did not replace, the specialist expertise practitioners brought to the sites. In the next section, I describe that expertise by drawing on the Vygotskian and Leont’evian ideas outlined in this section.

Relational Expertise, Common Knowledge and Relational Agency

These three concepts will weave their way through the contributions to this collection. In brief, they are the labels I have given to the aspects of the expertise exercised by the practitioners who accomplished effective interprofessional work that strengthened children and families. They capture a capacity to recognise, respect and work with the professional motives and therefore what matters in the professional practice of potential collaborators. In this section, I illustrate the ideas with examples from my own research, but the chapters that follow will indicate their wider relevance.

Elsewhere I have referred to the three concepts as gardening tools that have been used to build, nurture and sustain the expertise needed for collaborations across practice boundaries (Edwards, Reference Edwards2012). The metaphor reflects the comment from two Norwegian researchers in the field of public management, that horizontal working between agencies 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 & Lægreid, Reference Christensen and Laegreid2007, p. 1063).

The first and overarching concept is relational expertise, which is a capacity to work relationally with others on complex problems. Crucially, it involves the joint interpretation of the problem as well as the joint response. The object of activity needs to be collectively expanded to reveal as much of the complexity as possible.

Relational expertise therefore involves knowing how to know who can help. Lundvall, discussing the ‘Learning Economy’, described the importance of know-who, to augment know-what, why and how (Lundvall & Johnson, Reference Lundvall and Johnson1994), in the following way: ‘Know-who involves information about who knows what and who knows to do what. But especially it involves the social capability to establish relationships to specialised groups in order to draw upon their expertise’ (Lundvall, Reference Lundvall1996, p. 6).

His basic premise was that knowledge is a collective asset that can be shared, and therefore we need to create the conditions in which that sharing is possible. Crucially, sharing in his definition of know-who involves recognising that each collaborator will have different expertise, and he is careful to say that lists of potential experts are not what is needed. Instead, systems need to be designed to enable flexible forms of collaboration.

Highlighting know-who or knowing how to know who as a capability to establish relationships is useful. My own work has shown that people may be good at working relationally across practice boundaries, based on old friendships and years of trust building, but these relationships may not be the most relevant when tackling a new problem. Knowing how to recognise the expertise of others and to be able to make one’s own expertise explicit is therefore crucial. It involves being professionally multilingual, recognising the meanings that different practices give to words and their importance in each practice discourse. From a cultural-historical perspective, knowing how to know who is a capability that can be broken down into being able to (i) recognise the standpoints and motives of those who inhabit other practices and (ii) align motives mutually in interpreting and responding to a problem.

Relational expertise is therefore an additional form of expertise that augments specialist expertise and makes fluid and responsive collaborations possible. A practitioner once described it as follows: ‘it is only a matter of adjusting what you do to other people’s strengths and needs’. But it is also more than that. Nowotny, discussing knowledge flows that do not dilute ideas, has indicated the need to design for knowledge exchange in the following way: ‘Experts must now extend their knowledge, not simply to be an extension of what they know in their specialist field, but to consist of building links and trying to integrate what they know with what others want to, or should know and do’ (Nowotny, Reference Nowotny2003, p. 155).

In order to understand how to build these links, we turn to the concept of common knowledge (Edwards, Reference Edwards2010, Reference Edwards2011, Reference Edwards2012). The common knowledge that was relevant to smooth interprofessional work was not knowledge of how to do each others’ jobs; that route would have led to hybridity and the loss of specialist expertise. Instead common knowledge, in the sense used here, is made up of what matters in each profession, the motives that shape and take forward professional practice.

Common knowledge, a respectful understanding of different professional motives, can then become a resource that can mediate responsive collaborations on complex problems. In this sense, common knowledge is what Vygotskians would recognise as a second stimulus. In brief, the first stimulus is the problem being worked on, and the second is made up of the cultural resources or tools available to interpret and work on it. The second stimulus provides possibilities for action and enables the actors to control their behaviours as they tackle the problem. In experimental designs, how the second stimulus is used gives the researcher access to how the acting subject is thinking. But even in experimental settings, as Engeström (Reference Engeström2011) observes, the agency of the subject comes into play in how and why the tools are used. The second stimulus is therefore a resource that is constructed and reconstructed in use on problems while it mediates actions on the problems.

For example, knowledge of each others’ motives allows the teacher to recognise why the social worker needs time to strengthen the family before key decisions are made. Likewise, the social worker can begin to see links between school attendance, attainment and social inclusion, what matters for the teacher. In brief, the motivated interpretations and intentional responses to problems of practice, which are made by practitioners from different practices, are brought into alignment through the use of shared understandings of what matters for each collaborator. Through that process, work on complex tasks is accomplished.

Common knowledge does not arise spontaneously; attention needs to be paid to the conditions in which it is built. My own work suggests that it is created over time in interactions in sites of intersecting practices, which overtly emphasise the following:

• Recognising similar long-term open goals, such as children’s well-being, as some kind of affective or value-laden glue that holds all motives together

• Revealing specific professional values and motives in discussions, by legitimising asking for and giving reasons for interpretations and suggestions

• Listening to, recognising and engaging with the values and motives of others.

Here is another practitioner who outlined the process of building common knowledge quite succinctly:

The final sentence in this statement crucially points to motives, what matters in each practice. Attempts at surfacing the ‘whys’ of practice can, of course, be seen by others as challenge rather than interest. Understanding reasons therefore won’t easily happen unless some ground rules are established as part of the design. Recently I have begun to draw on Derry’s work on ‘the space of reasons’ (Derry, Reference Derry2013, p. 230) to examine what makes for successful interactions in sites of intersecting practices. Derry argues that discursive spaces where the asking for and giving of reasons are expected are where what is important, yet perhaps not articulated in the ‘rough ground’ of practice, can be surfaced and scrutinised (Edwards, Reference Edwards2015). At the very least, sites of intersecting practices, where reasons are given and considered seriously, are places where common knowledge, the knowledge of the motives in the potentially collaborating practices, can be made visible.

Common knowledge is of course important when planning support for a family over time, but it is perhaps most crucially important when action needs to be taken quickly to remove a child from harm, or to prevent children encountering danger, through perhaps unforeseen homelessness. Here we come to the third gardening tool: relational agency. Relational agency first emerged as a concept while I was observing how family workers supported vulnerable women in a drop-in centre and how, in turn, the women users of the centre supported each other (Edwards, Reference Edwards2005). Their joint agency meant they were powerful when they worked together on a common problem.

These collaborations were possible because each person recognised what mattered for the other and was able to listen to how the other interpreted the problem and how they were able to respond to it. This careful listening and understanding of each others’ motives meant they could expand their understanding of the problem, work on the whole set of difficulties and could then calibrate their specialist responses in ways that worked with rather than against each other (Edwards, Reference Edwards2005, Reference Edwards2010, Reference Edwards2012).

Since identifying these relational concepts in successful interprofessional collaborations, I have used them to interrogate relationships in other spheres. I’ll briefly outline one current project, a longitudinal development study of pedagogy in higher education in a network of South African universities.

The project, funded by the South African National Research Foundation and led by Viv Bozalek at the University of the Western Cape, focusses on participatory parity in the professions. It is aiming at developing the capacity of higher education teachers to work with the strengths that students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds bring to the classroom, as they train for professions such as law, social work and teaching. Here the intention is that what matters and why it matters for the students is elicited at the same time as the tutors are explicit about what matters for them and the teaching programme and why it matters. The common knowledge generated then becomes a pedagogic resource that allows students to build on the strengths they bring from their communities while also gaining access to the demands and priorities of the professions they are to join. This project has recently started as a series of action research studies and is beginning to mark out a new direction for the use and testing of the three concepts. Challenges to be expected as they go forward include how tutors are able to make their concerns explicit in ways which invite students to engage with them rather than feel they need to merely comply.

Through the examples discussed so far it has become increasingly clear that attention needs to be paid to the conditions in which relational expertise can give rise to the formation and use of common knowledge in collaborations. There is therefore a question of design for relational work that occurs across practices. Key features of the design seem to be as follows: recognising that interpretations of the object of activity are always provisional and will change; that these interpretations occur in sites of intersecting practices where there are clear ground rules that focus on building common knowledge through asking why and giving reasons; that the common knowledge that arises will itself develop over time as it is deployed in joint interpretations and responses; and that the architectures designed to allow for collaboration are therefore provisional and responsive to the knowledge and purposes that emerge. These four features together suggest a degree of professional risk, as they require the practitioner to work outside the comfort of established institutional practices for at least some of the time. At the same time, they resonate with what Evetts has described as occupational professionalism, as an alternative to organisationally sustained professionalism (Evetts, Reference Evetts2003, Reference Evetts2009), where occupational professionalism is marked by professional values and what the profession holds dear. I pursue the relevance of the three concepts for professionalism in the next section.

Relational Work as Transactions

Recently Munk wrote about the concepts in a journal aimed at Danish psychologists interested in organisational change (Munk, Reference Munk2013). His article was introduced by the journal’s editor as offering a radical approach to organisational learning. I shall outline three ways in which the transactional nature of the relational concepts may justify a view that they are radical, while arguing that they enable flexibility of response within a strong values-laden framing, promoting instability with stability. The areas of study are professional work as knowledge work; valuing and strengthening the contributions of clients; and leadership that aims at releasing the expertise in an organisation.

Professional work as knowledge work Using relational expertise and common knowledge in professional work calls into question the idea of simple knowledge transfer, whether the hoped-for transfer is from policy to practice, from one practitioner to another or from professional to client. Instead, once one works relationally, building and using common knowledge to jointly interpret and respond, one is in a transaction that can involve knowledge production. The idea of knowledge work as transaction certainly aligns with Leont’ev’s view when he wrote, as we have already seen, ‘… practice is that process in the course of whose development cognitive problems arise, human perceptions and thought originate and develop, and which at the same time contains in itself criteria of the adequacy and truth of knowledge’ (Leont’ev, Reference Leont’ev1978b, p. 2).

This kind of transactional knowledge work involves recognising the histories in the practices and moving forward to a jointly produced and co-owned revised version of future practice. In one example of this process, Hermansen has examined teachers’ knowledge work in relation to professional collaboration for policy implementation (Hermansen, Reference Hermansen2014). She followed groups of teachers from mixed disciplines in Norwegian secondary schools who were required to incorporate a particular form of formative assessment into school practices. The schools were at pains to avoid mindless policy implementation but to give the teachers time to design approaches to assessment that fitted with existing school priorities, yet also allowed for the pedagogic innovations offered by the new policy.

Hermansen defined knowledge work in cultural-historical terms as ‘the actions that teachers carry out as they work with and upon the knowledge that informs their professional practice’ (p. 470). The interactions she captured are typical of the relational work that remains hidden and backstage when professional performance is evaluated. Yet this work seems essential if teachers, as occupational professionals, are to recognise the potential in new tools and fashion them to fit the purposes of institutional practices while also reshaping those practices. The new tools, a new form of assessment, were not taken as readymade and to be easily inserted established routines. Instead, their potentially disruptive qualities were acknowledged in the moves the teachers made towards transformation and renewal of established school practices.

At the same time, their struggles to make sense of the potential in the new tools and to connect them to what mattered for them, such as good relations with parents, student attainment and so on, meant that teachers articulated the knowledge that motivated them as professionals and underpinned their professional decisions. In the meetings that Hermansen recorded, the teachers first constructed common knowledge, which consisted of these value-laden motives, and then used that common knowledge as a second stimulus to construct new understandings of the potential to be found in the formative assessment as a pedagogic tool. At the same time, they held fast to their beliefs about what mattered in teaching. These new understandings then went on to inform future school practice.

Valuing and strengthening the contributions of clients In Hermansen’s work, the object of activity was at times practice itself, echoing Miettinen and Virkkunen’s suggestion that practice can be treated as an object to be worked on (Miettinen & Virkkunen, Reference Miettinen and Virkkunen2005). In other types of professional work, however, the object of activity is the client in his or her own practices, presenting the danger that the client becomes objectified as the problem rather than part of the solution. The three relational concepts can, instead, help structure a way of seeing interactions with clients as transactions in which what matters for the client contributes to the common knowledge that is built as a resource. The common knowledge is then used in joint work on, for example, a child’s trajectory or a family’s housing problem.

The Danish journal editor was right: this approach is radical. It raises a raft of questions about whose knowledge counts, which can undermine elitist ideas of professional expertise. I am not describing how practitioners recognise, value and use the ‘funds of knowledge’ to be found in economically disadvantaged communities (Moll & Greenberg, Reference Moll, Greenberg and Moll1990). Rather, I am suggesting that what matters for professionals and clients both count and can be brought together as a resource for joint action.

It may be that at first clients need to be helped to contribute to the common knowledge and then engage relationally in using it when working on the problem. This is a capabilities’ approach of the kind advocated by Sen (Reference Sen1999). In Vygotskian terms, it enables clients to act on and transform the practices they inhabit (Edwards, Reference Edwards2007). Here is a practitioner describing this kind of professional–client relationship: ‘the main [client] participation is in the individual packages we do with families, which are very much family-led really. It is around their description and understanding of their needs, the targets we all agree to work towards, and their evaluations of the things at the end really’ (Edwards, Reference Edwards2010, p. 88). This extract points to respecting the agency of the client, who both sets targets and evaluates whether they have been achieved. At the same time, professional expertise and the respect accorded to it is not guaranteed, but needs to be negotiated with the client as part of the knowledge-building transactions. This negotiated form of professionalism again points to Evetts’ occupational category, and is marked by nonroutine responsiveness to the strengths as well as the needs of clients.

Leadership that aims at releasing the expertise in an organisation In most organisations, the largest costs are staff, yet all too frequently the resources that employees bring to the system are underused (Yanow, Reference Yanow2004), their knowledge counting for little. The problem is often seen in terms of different ‘knowledge regimes’ (Howard-Grenville & Carlile, Reference Howard-Grenville and Carlile2006), so that knowledge is rarely mobilised across the regime boundaries and taken ‘upstream’ to inform strategy (Edwards, Reference Edwards2010).

More recently we have examined the problem from a different perspective (Daniels & Edwards, Reference 20Edwards and Daniels2012; Edwards & Thompson, Reference Edwards, Thompson, Sannino and Ellis2013). The context was the reorganisation of children’s services in England under the leadership of a Director of Children’s Services (DCS) in each local authority. These systemic changes were aimed at integrating the work of the different professionals who supported children and families, but they coincided with huge cuts in funding as a result of the 2008 banking crisis and the election of a right-of-centre coalition government in 2010. The DCS therefore needed to identify and use every ounce of resource they could in order to ensure that children and families were safe and could flourish. The DCS were not alone in recognising staff as crucial resources. Engeström has recently observed more generally that ‘… employees’ collective capacity to create organizational transformations and innovations is becoming a crucially important asset that gives a new, dynamic content to notions of collaborative work and social capital’ (Engeström, Reference Engeström2008, p. 199).

I was initially involved in a study that produced a report for these newly appointed DCS, which was entitled Resourceful Leadership (Hannan et al., Reference Hannan, Canwell, Longfils and Edwards2011). The idea of the resourceful leader, who made the most of his or her staff resources, touched a nerve among the DCS, and we were asked to examine in detail what some of the most resourceful DCS actually did (Daniels & Edwards, Reference 20Edwards and Daniels2012). Unsurprisingly, we found that they worked relationally with their colleagues to elicit what mattered for them and importantly to be very explicit about what mattered from themselves as strategic leaders. The DCS all talked of building organisational narratives that wove together what mattered for the different services that were combining in the new system. This narrative comprised the common knowledge, which then could be used as a second stimulus when there was a need for the different services to collaborate strategically or for individuals to take joint action with a family.

The DCS were clear about their priorities, values and motives when working with colleagues; but they also were at pains to demonstrate that they were good listeners who took others’ perspectives seriously and recognised the knowledge and values they brought. We found that they were also particularly adept at using the narratives to negotiate alignment in motives at the levels of practice, activity and action shown in Figure 1.1. The narratives therefore brought a degree of stability to a system in flux, while also engaging the professional values and commitment of colleagues at different levels within the organisations. There are nonetheless limits to the negotiations: those who didn’t agree with the institutional narratives were usually encouraged to leave.

The study did not examine how well the common knowledge held in the narratives operated as a resource for practitioners on the front line while they worked with vulnerable children and families; but it was certainly the intention of the DCS that it should. They were aiming at releasing the agency and responsiveness of all staff, within the stabilising frame of a set of shared values, which reflected what mattered for them all as professionals (Edwards & Thompson, Reference Edwards, Thompson, Sannino and Ellis2013). In this regard, the DCS were going with the grain of leaders in other organisations where uncertainty is the norm. In a review of research on what they term ‘relational work design’, Grant and Parker explain the need to engage the agency of workers in shaping their work systems to allow for reciprocity with clients on the grounds that uncertainty can’t be managed through systems based on hierarchies of control. Instead, systems need to be designed so that employees are able to take the initiative (Grant & Parker, Reference Grant and Parker2009). Stable instability, where there are commonly understood goals and values and flexibility of response, seems to mark these designs.

Each example of how the relational concepts call for agentic and negotiated transactions, which can inform and shape practices, is radical only if the idea of service is stripped out of professionalism. Over fifty years ago, Wilensky defined professionalism as follows: ‘the degree of professionalization is measured not just by the degree of success in the claim to exclusive technical competence, but also by the degree of adherence to the service ideal and its supporting norms of professional conduct’ (Wilensky, Reference Wilensky1964, p. 141). I have long argued that we need a refreshed view of being a professional in the public services that keeps alive that service ideal (Edwards, Reference Edwards2010; Edwards & Daniels, Reference 20Edwards and Daniels2012). While the transactional model I have been proposing is likely to involve a destabilising questioning of whose knowledge counts, it can also include a reassertion of professional values and of responsible decision making for all involved.

The Contributions to the Book

Each of the chapters that follow shows how the three relational concepts have been tested and refined in use. As I indicated at the start of this chapter, concepts are tools and, like any tool, what they accomplish varies in response to where, how and why they are put to use. The chapters are organised into three parts to help focus on particular areas of activity. Chapters 2 to 7 focus on research on professional work. The second set of chapters, Chapters 8 to 12, examines how the ideas are employed in studies of networks and working across practice boundaries. While all the contributions make both theoretical and methodological points, the chapters in the third part, Chapters 13 to 16, specifically focus on advances in research design and methodology associated with the three concepts. In the final chapter, Chapter 17, I reflect on how the tools have been developed in use by the contributors. The introduction to the chapters here is therefore brief.

Working relationally in the professions In Chapter 2, Nick Hopwood uses the concepts to analyse how short-term residential interventions with vulnerable families in New South Wales build the resilience of the parents who take part in them. His study presents clear examples of how partnership models of working with clients enable them to work on and change the practices they inhabit. Chapter 3 is also from Australia. Joce Nuttall describes how hospital-based play-workers work with medical specialists who are trying to treat young children. She shows in detail how one UK play-worker, as an education specialist, builds common knowledge with her medical colleagues and exercises relational agency when working with them and the child patients. Chapter 4 reports a study based in a school–university relationship in Italy. Here Annalisa Sannino and Yrjö Engeström examine how the relational underpinnings of material resources can be used as second stimuli to tackle conflicts of motives in a formative intervention. In Chapter 5, a team from Chile, Carmen Montecinos, Verónica Leiva, Fabián Campos, Luis Ahumada and Sergio Galdames, draw on interviews and observations with two newly appointed school principals to reveal the importance of building and using common knowledge as a resource for engaging practitioners in the development of institutional practices. The study reported in Chapter 6 is based in Rajasthan. Prabhat Rai has analysed the institutional practices of a successful group of schools in this region of northern India. In his contribution, he focusses on how the staff in one school build common knowledge with the parents in the villages they serve. Drawing on Derry’s work on giving and asking for reasons (Derry, Reference Derry2008, Reference Derry2013), Rai particularly emphasises how attention to common knowledge brings to the surface the commitments of participants in productive ways. The final chapter in this section, Chapter 7, is from a South African team, Shirley Walters, Freda Daniels and Vernon Weitz, who discuss a study based in an initiative to create responsive pedagogies in the practices of three departments in one university, with a strong history of engaging first-generation students from economically deprived backgrounds. They examine the political nature of the provision of learning opportunities and report on a particular moment in the research process, where exercising relational expertise broke through the competing concerns about the initiative to build common knowledge.

Working relationally in networks In Chapter 8, a Finnish team, Kai Hakkarainen, Kaisa Hytönen, Jenna Vekkaila and Tuire Palonen, build on their longstanding efforts at shifting notions of expertise from overly individualistic models. Here they offer a discussion of the conceptual and methodological implications of relational analyses in four studies of how networks, in different domains, function. In Chapter 9, another Finnish contribution, Laura Seppänen and Hanna Toiviainen offer a compelling account of how relational agency is instrumental in building crucial meditational tools as resources, in a meta-analysis of five developmental projects. In Chapter 10, we turn to the rationale for and construction of a local network, which aims at enhancing teacher and school development and knowledge-sharing in research. Here Nigel Fancourt explains how the Oxford Education Deanery in the United Kingdom was built as a site of intersecting practices connecting local schools with the University of Oxford. Nigel calls on the ideas of ‘sensegiving’ and ‘sensemaking’ to be found in narrative theory to explain how a narrative, which consisted of common knowledge, was built and used to take forward the initiative. In Chapter 11, Marc Thompson, Catherine Dolan, Colin Mayer, Kate Roll and Ruth Yeoman describe how a large multinational corporation tries to work with potentially conflicting motives in an initiative in Kenya that aims at both increasing sales among the most socially deprived (the Bottom of the Pyramid) and at poverty reduction. They conclude that building common knowledge is one way of working productively with both motives. In Chapter 12, the last chapter in this part, from Australia, Marilyn Fleer, Iris Dunn and Linda Harrison report how they employed the relational concepts to develop a research tool that can be used in two ways: to evaluate the extent to which interprofessional collaboration is taking place in early years provision and as a developmental resource to assist in building common knowledge and exercising relational agency and expertise.

Working relationally in research This part starts with two Danish contributions. In Chapter 13, Cathrine Hasse offers a detailed reflection on the need to attend to relationships with material artefacts in interventions. Focussing on the roles of researchers in intervention research, she highlights the additional kind of relational expertise that is called for in order to recognise the potential agency of material artefacts such as iPads. Relationships in intervention research are also pursued in Chapter 14 by Mariane Hedegaard, who guides the reader through a piece of practice developing research in two kindergartens. In the process, common knowledge, what matters in kindergarten practice, is built and the practitioners come to recognise the temporal aspects of their own role in supporting children’s life trajectories. Here Hedegaard reflects on the relational aspects of the researchers’ roles, including their intellectual contributions to this growing awareness. In the third chapter in this part, Chapter 15, Eleni Stamou and I discuss knowledge exchange and social impact strategies in social science research from a relational perspective. Drawing on a small interview-based study in England, we point to the use of relational expertise in the accounts of successful knowledge exchange and impact that are offered. The focus shifts to designing the conditions for volunteers’ engagement in citizen science in Chapter 16. In this contribution, Bipana Bantawa discusses the role of relational expertise in designing the epistemic architecture that supports Galaxy Zoo, a large-scale citizen science initiative designed to produce big data for astrophysics.

In the final chapter, Chapter 17, I offer a reflective commentary on the contributions and their refining of the three core concepts and consider the implications of these developments for analyses of relational work.