Situating Boundary Work: Chronic Disease Prevention in Danish Hospitals

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.