Do We Still Need Professional Boundaries? The multiple influences of boundaries on interprofessional collaboration
研究通过英国国家医疗服务体系四个跨职业团队的78次深度访谈和两年观察，发现职业边界并非只有阻碍协作的负面作用，其存在反而帮助团队成员识别专业类别、预测他人专长和任务，从而促进协作。
Although a body of research suggests that interprofessional collaboration is hindered by the presence of professional boundaries, more recent work has demonstrated that removing these boundaries also has negative consequences for collaboration. To address these paradoxical findings, we examine two different team-level initiatives that aimed at softening and breaking down professional boundaries, drawing on data gathered from 78 in-depth interviews and two years of observations of four cross-occupational teams in the English National Health Service. Our inductive analysis of this data shows that professionals use boundaries and their manifestations – which become apparent through materialization, articulation and embodiment – to identify and retrieve professional categories. The conspicuous presence of boundaries allows professionals to anticipate other team members’ expertise and roles, as well as different aspects of team tasks. We theorize our findings by showing how professional boundaries can be positively interlaced with interprofessional collaboration by making visible and grounding naturalized systems of classification.