three - Knowledge and networks

Summary

Introduction

This chapter and the next seek to understand why securing compliance with the ‘cooperation mandate’ in child protection may continue to be problematic. One of the major problems identified in successive child abuse inquiry reports (DHSS, 1982; DoH, 1991) was the failure of professionals to share vital knowledge and skills. A new approach to practice emerged as a result, based on the twin assumptions that knowledge in child protection could be standardised into written procedures and that children would be protected as long as professionals based their decisions on these knowledge ‘stratagems’. This approach, however, posits a simplistic relationship between knowledge and its application. Drawing on theories of knowledge management, this chapter argues that the relationship between knowledge acquisition and human behaviour is complex. As such, it questions whether the introduction of knowledge stratagems such as practice protocols is sufficient to ensure effective interprofessional collaboration.

The chapter begins by considering the general tension between professional ‘ways of knowing’ and the attempt to codify this knowledge into detailed procedures that seek to influence, even control, professional action. It then examines the difficulties within interagency and interprofessional networks that may arise from the different, and at times competing, knowledge ‘domains’ of the various participants. The constraints over knowledge sharing are explored and the chapter considers the ways in which the propensity to share can be disturbed by external factors such as organisational change and wider ‘knowledge shifts’. A central concern is to illuminate the main factors that may serve to undermine the efficacy of knowledge stratagems as a means of controlling professional practice and ensuring network equilibrium.

Professional learning and social control

In the current political climate surrounding the public sector, demands for better evaluation of services, particularly of their ‘value for money’, have grown. These have been augmented by the desire for greater certainty, seeking solutions to variation in professional performance and service outcome. The next chapter highlights the ways in which the introduction of new public management (NPM) approaches to health and social care services attempted to ‘open up’ areas of professional practice to managerial scrutiny and control. These developments also sought to encourage the ‘scientification’ of professional practice by privileging the role of empirical ‘evidence’ over professional experience or intuition.