Professional Responsibility: New Horizons of Praxis

In the face of increasing complexity of professional work, professional responsibility remains open to further development. The book signals direction for the development of professional responsibility, and while seeking to give direction to ongoing deliberations avoids the pitfalls of performativity.

The chapters are grounded in a variety of disciplinary perspectives and traverse various professional boundaries in a self-reflexive manner to create more inclusive, transformative and generative narratives on professional responsibility. This is achieved by:

• Focusing on normative dimensions of professional work and combining these with a focus on empirical aspects of professional practice in a variety of setting, and

• Recognising the inevitable tensions between personal trust and responsibility, and largely depersonalised policies and strategies of quality control when normative and empirical aspects of professional responsibility are situated within their policy environments.

The concluding narrative moves beyond deconstruction, complexity and critique of these considerations to a construction of new imagined horizons of professional responsibility from theoretical, conceptual and practical perspectives. This text sets out to transform professional responsibility through a re-configuration of its constituent elements in imaginative and creative ways and by indicating the ‘real world’ import of re-charting the field.