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The development and iteration of a body of professional knowledge appropriate to the demands of practice is a central concern of studies of professional education and work. This article concentrates on Bernstein’s notion of the ‘region’ of professional knowledge, identifying regions as complex socio-epistemic entities into which forms of knowledge are appropriated and transformed to meet the requirements of practice. In order to better understand the constitution of professional knowledge, there is a need to conceptualise how knowledge is recontextualised between regions, disciplinary ‘singulars’, and professional practice. Two variables, proximity and dominance, are introduced to illustrate how relations between regions, singulars and practice may vary, with implications for what is recontextualised into regions. In some professions, there are pressures for greater proximity between regions as a consequence of changes in work practices, while in others there is the potential for the dominance of recontextualisation processes by market and bureaucratic logics. It is suggested that actors within regions need to find ways to maintain authority over professional knowledge while avoiding the risks of control by bodies ill-equipped to maintain knowledge validity. The analysis provides a lens through which to view developments in the knowledge bases of professional, or professionalising, occupations, and concomitant changes in professional education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional practice is embedded in complex dynamics of knowledge that are present within, but reach beyond, local work. Knowledge is generated from a manifold of sources, and further developed and circulated in professional communities as practitioners are confronted with non-routine problems. Drawing on the work of Karin Knorr Cetina and her associates, we suggest that a perspective of epistemic practices and object relations is useful for conceptualising the epistemic dimensions of professional work and learning. We consider how the perspective has inspired research on professional practice and use examples from the nursing profession to illustrate how it may be employed to examine: (i) how practitioners develop knowledge and practice by engaging with epistemic objects; (ii) how relations with objects give rise to community formation and (iii) how object relations link practitioners with a wider knowledge world. We argue that the perspective is productive for investigating knowledge practices as constituted by dynamic object relations across sites and levels in the expert culture. To further improve its potential in professional contexts, however, we suggest the need for the development of analytic concepts that differentiate between modes of epistemic engagement and account for the presence of multiple knowledge objects in professional practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We draw on the analytic resources of cultural historical activity theory and the work of (Basil) Bernstein and Knorr Cetina to examine evidence from a study of inter-professional practices in children’s services in three English local authorities (local government systems). The study traced the horizontal (e.g. cross service) and vertical (e.g. between strategy and operation) integration of services for children including social work and educational psychology at time of reductions in local authority funding. Interviews and meetings, structured by the principles of developmental work research, required senior local authority staff to identify the objects of activity that shaped the work of the services for which they were responsible, to reveal how those objects were threatened by changing configurations of services and to reflect on what features of the services should be taken forward in these reconfigurations. The study therefore made visible the motives that become evident when professional knowledge is brought to bear on problems of professional practices. In examining the interplay between professional knowledge – which includes notions of the service ideal – and objects of activity, we identified ‘what matters’ in practices within services and ‘what matters’ when practices intersect and objects of activity are negotiated across practice boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses professional learning as intrinsic to social practices. It takes its point of departure in a sociocultural notion of mediation and communication in human activity and addresses the constitutive nature of language and artefacts as material-semiotic tools in the social coordination of perspectives and action, meaning-making and gap-bridging in professional work. The empirical examples are taken from different settings; an IT helpdesk team working in a multinational production company; vocational guidance officers working in a public employment office and from nurses at a rehabilitation ward in a hospital. The theoretical perspective is used when discussing these cases so as to display the use of the core concepts and the dynamics of change which may be illuminated by the analytical approach. In the conclusion, specific aspects of the materiality of social practice relevant for the study of learning and knowing in professional work are made salient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expression ‘knowing-in-practice’ focuses on practical reasoning and organising that takes place is working practices. An empirical analysis of the practice of cardiological teleconsultation allows to illustrate the characteristics of knowing-in-practice and how organising is discursively accomplished. The article illustrates how professional knowing-in-practice has an opaque dimension which is explored in terms of docta ignorantia, that is, a mode of practical knowledge unaware of its own principles that accommodates a full range of sociomaterial resources and interactional forms according to the logic of the practice at hand. The concepts of ‘generative model’ and ‘economy of logic’ are employed in order to analyse how professionals rely on docta ignorantia to accomplish the practice in which they are involved. The generative model of the practice of teleconsultation distinguishes between activities at the core of the practice (mobilising professional authority and jurisdiction; performing accountability on professional, legal and bureaucratic bases; enacting a diagnostic community) and activities at the margins of the same practice (learning, theorising in practice, performing of a professional self and of a community of professionals). While the former activities are oriented towards the formation of the object of practice, the latter are oriented to the reproduction of the practice itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University-workplace partnerships are strategies increasingly called for in higher education. This article reports on collaborative knowledge production between employed professional chemical engineers (registered for higher degrees) and their university-based supervisors (researchers in the field of chemical engineering). The study draws on a language of description, developed by Basil Bernstein, for understanding knowledge discourses and structures, the movement or 'recontextualisation' of knowledge from one domain to another and the role of knowledge in potential and actual practice. These concepts are used to analyse the ways in which knowledge production in partnerships between academic and professional engineers was enabled or constrained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]