Session Information
04 SES 11 C, School Organisation and Social Capital
Paper Session
Time:
2009-09-30
16:45-18:15
Room:
NIG, HS C
Chair:
David Skidmore
Contribution
In recent UK policy, such as Every Child Matters (DfES, 2004), multi-agency collaboration is increasingly important to policy-makers and practitioners in children’s services, while across Europe inter-professional working holds a key place on many government agendas. Partnerships in public services mean that professionals from different agencies and backgrounds must now work together as never before, yet guidance about joint working is lacking (Dalzell et al, 2007). Unique problems arise when professionals from different backgrounds work together, over and above issues that arise from collaboration in a single profession or discipline. These difficulties stem partially from differing ideologies, working practices and priorities encountered when education, social services, and health practitioners work together to further the interests of children.
Theoretical Perspective: Ideas about shared purposes, commitment to these purposes, and finding strategies to progress these purposes are prevalent across the literature on collaborative working. This paper links team reasoning theory to multi-agency working. Team reasoning (Sugden, 2005) assumes that, in certain circumstances, people consider their actions and outcomes in terms of what is best for the group, rather than for themselves as individuals. The key aspect of relevance in this theory is that it assumes that individuals in interaction develop commitments to the group’s goals and outcomes.
In some situations collaborative working can be relatively straightforward, with little to suggest that commitment to group goals and appropriate strategies may be problematic. However, inter-professional teams by their very nature are likely to give rise to dilemmas, particularly around trying to coordinate and develop a collective goal. This paper aims to explore the link between multi-agency collaborative working and team reasoning, through exploration and discussion of dilemmas that might arise in collaborative working.
Research Questions: Do people conceptualise team reasoning in their discussions of collaborative dilemmas? What other issues arise in discussions on the different dilemmas? How do these issues relate to team reasoning?
Sample: Eight teams with a reputation for effective multi-agency working (as recommended by directorial level staff in children’s services and by other researchers in the field), taken from two types of English geographic areas (metropolitan and urban), and three different service areas (three from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services; two from Child Protection; and three from Special Educational Needs), took part in the research.
Method
Three types of dilemmas around inter-professional working were identified from the research literature: control (where professionals from different backgrounds have to reconcile contradictory models of practice and different versions of knowledge); identity (where professionals face tension between maintaining deep specialist knowledge and an “expert” professional identity, and contributing in a more generic, cross-disciplinary way to provision); and expertise (where professionals experience conflict around roles that do not use their areas of specialist expertise). Hypothetical scenarios based on real experiences that illustrated these dilemmas in context were constructed with practitioners from the three different service areas. Individual interviews with team members and focus groups with teams discussed the problems and possible resolutions in the dilemmas. Transcripts were analysed for emergent themes and coded in NVivo.
Expected Outcomes
Four main interconnected themes arose: Identity, expertise, territory and power. These themes arose partly from dilemma topics but were not clearly delineated between dilemmas. They originate in the details of professional activity or role: what the professional does, who they interact with, how professional relationships are played out.
Many participants discussed sharing a focus with other team members, but only some differentiated between a shared general focus and specifying shared goals, shared perceptions of needs of service users, and shared understandings of how those needs could be met. This type of discussion conceptualised team reasoning, but did not in itself address the difficulties around power, expertise, territory and identity that lie beneath the “perfect” team reasoning solution. Team reasoning, therefore, may entail some professional sacrifice. Professionals who engage in collaborative working need to be aware of these complications, in order to negotiate the construction of and commitment to shared goals.
References
Department for Education and Skills. (2004). Every Child Matters: Change for Children. Nottingham: DfES Publications. Dalzell, J., Nelson, H., Haigh, C., Williams, A. and Monti§, P. (2007). Involving families who have deaf children using a Family Needs Survey: a multi-agency perspective. Child: Care, Health and Development 33, no.5: 576-585. Sugden, R. (2005). The logic of team reasoning. In N. Gold (Ed.) Teamwork: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives, 181-199. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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