Situating Boundary Work: Chronic Disease Prevention in Danish Hospitals

Abstract

This paper investigates how health professions compete and cooperate in addressing emerging local work tasks defined in relation to new globalized health challenges, such as type 2 diabetes. It identifies which professional groups have claimed responsibility for the tasks and by means of which kinds of interactions and infighting. The materials entail workplace-related artefacts and documents; in-depth interviews and extended conversations with health professionals about goals, dilemmas, and practices linked to prevention of lifestyle-related diseases; and site visits at Danish hospitals. Grounding Abbott’s framework of jurisdictions and his meso-level vocabulary in a situated account of professional boundary work, the analysis follows the ways that nurses in particular create, and sometimes stabilize or standardize, techniques for a disease prevention programme less than a decade old. The paper argues that processual theory of boundary work would benefit from grounding in a situated account of forms of professional boundaries within emerging jurisdictional tasks.