Professional responsibility in the borderlands: Facing irreconcilable accountability regimes in veterinary work
基于2012-2020年的纵向民族志研究，提出概念模型解释兽医如何在数据驱动的问责制度中陷入不可调和的问责冲突，并指出这种冲突创造了职业责任的可能性。
(Dutch) veterinarians have increasingly been confronted with conflicting accountability regimes, related to data-driven, networked accountability systems, to decrease the use of antibiotics in veterinary practices. Based on our longitudinal ethnography (2012–2020), we propose a conceptual model that illustrates how professionals intra-actively become positioned in different accountability regimes, yet which is continually diffracted by the recalling of their responsibilities to proximal and distant others. By taking an agential realist approach, we contribute to recent critical perspectives on accountability by showing how veterinary professionals become positioned as specific accountable subjects and yet how such positioning simultaneously produces the ‘borderlands’ – a space of indeterminacy in which the accounting practices of the professional are continuously weighed in light of incommensurable responsibilities. Based on our results, we show how conflicting accountability regimes are—as often argued—not to be ‘fixed’ through commensuration, nor are they dysfunctional. Rather, they create the very condition of indeterminacy, opening up the possibility for professional responsibility. We offer suggestions for how to further investigate this appreciation of the borderlands, for example, by focusing on how the account holder can draw from other responsibilities to counter a dominant accountability regime, and how governing authorities can become positioned as responsible for keeping professionals in the borderlands.