Boundary Work in Response to Professionals’ Contextual Constraints: Micro-strategies in Interprofessional Collaboration

Abstract

Boundary-work research has extensively explored how professionals engage in boundary work to protect or expand their professional boundaries in interprofessional collaboration (IPC). Yet professionals’ contextual constraints in everyday work, such as time pressure or legal restrictions, often result in competing interests of the professionals involved in IPC, prompting them to engage in boundary work to limit—instead of protect or expand—their boundaries. Our empirical analysis uses comprehensive qualitative data on IPC in Germany between self-employed general practitioners (GPs) and registered nurses employed in nursing homes in which GPs’ efficiency interests compete with nurses’ safeguarding interests, leading both professionals to engage in boundary-work efforts to limit their boundaries. Our findings provide a comprehensive understanding and framework of professionals’ boundary work, showing that individual GPs and nurses typically hold a portfolio of various defending and accommodating micro-strategies. Based on our first-order findings, we identify how different sources of power enable particular micro-strategies and explore how the choice of micro-strategies depends on different forms of trust in the collaborating partner. Lastly, we outline interactions of micro-strategies, illustrating how the outcomes of professionals’ bilateral boundary work depend on the sequence of these strategies.

Modeling the Effect of Corporate Sponsorship on the Organizational Image of Selected Insurance Companies in Edo State, Nigeria

“…This partly explains why the respondents rated the selected insurance companies high in business-wise indices. Overall, the result of the current study has extended that of previous researchers (Hansson et al, 2022; Huber, 2022; Weber et al, 2022) that examined issues related to organizations’ progress without clearly focusing on the impact of corporate sponsorship on the image of insurance companies. The current study is different from that of Amoako et al (2012) because it focused on the contributing role of corporate sponsorship on organizational image unlike Amoako et al who examined the effectiveness of CS in marketing performance, brand value, and identity.…”

“…Biraglia and Gerrath (2020) argue that corporate sponsorship is helpful approach for improving the public rating of the image of an organization. Other researchers (Hansson et al, 2022; Huber, 2022; Weber et al, 2022) agree that business organizations take their image seriously so that they will be able to meet up with the existing competition.…”

All the good care: Valuation and task differentiation in older person care

“…Interestingly, the GPs, backed by their professional association, staved off the more complex, non‐routine work, while accepting the more routine work of providing basic medical care in nursing homes. We postulate that in times of scarcity, professionals will increasingly focus on limiting their professional jurisdiction (Weber et al., 2022). However, whether this implies that professionals of equal status (as GPs and EPs are) increasingly focus on non‐routine work, while moving routine work to others is a topic that requires further enquiry.…”

“…Conflicts in task reallocation initiatives in times of scarcity, however, could have severe consequences for the accessibility and quality of care for clients. Professionals may well prioritise accessibility, continuity of care and other such values above, defending the interests of their professional group (Weber et al., 2022).…”

The Enactment of Professional Boundary Work: A Case Study of Crime Investigation

“…Still, the question of why boundary work takes on different forms and trajectories has been less studied. In this regard, a common line of thought has been that asymmetries in power and social status have been associated with defensive boundary work (Bucher et al, 2016) while trust amongst actors and belonging to interprofessional communities of practice has been related to collaboration and efforts to blur boundaries (Johannesen, 2018;Meier, 2015;Weber et al, 2022). Nevertheless, many questions are still unanswered regarding this theoretical inference.…”