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22 July 2011, saw the biggest domestic terror event in Norway since World War II. On this day, a right-wing terrorist placed a bomb in front of the Norwegian government building, where the prime minister had his office at the time. Later, the same perpetrator dressed up as a policeman and tricked his way into a political youth camp, where 69 mostly young people were killed. The present case study involves the leading national online news provider, VG, whose website, VG Nett, was Norway’s most-read online news site at the time of the attack. The study addresses the research gap of how news workers and managers see the potential of the affordances of digital media during crisis events. Furthermore, the study looks at how two different discourses of professionalism, the occupational and the organisational, informed journalists’ use of technological and social media affordances during this terror event, and at how online journalists and management reflect upon and continue to refine these approaches five years later. This study stresses the importance of a clear understanding of the decision-making processes that actually guide the handling of those affordances during a crisis event. Ultimately, this study questions not the perceived tension between the two discourses of professionalism, but their relative impact upon domestic crisis journalism in the technological realm.

The purpose of this paper is to explore different health care professionals’ discourse about privacy – its definition and importance in health care, and its role in their day-to-day work. Professionals’ discourse about privacy reveals how new technologies and laws challenge existing practices of information control within and between professional groups in health care, with implications not only for patient privacy, but also for the role of information control in professions more generally.

The authors conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with n=83 doctors, nurses, and health information professionals in two academic medical centers and one veteran’s administration hospital/clinic in the Northeastern USA. Interview responses were qualitatively coded for themes and patterns across groups were identified.

The health care providers and the authors studied actively sought to uphold the protection (and control) of patient information through professional ethics and practices, as well as through the use of technologies and compliance with legal regulations. They used discourses of professionalism, as well as of law and technology, to sometimes accept and sometimes resist changes to practice required in the changing technological and legal context of health care. The authors found differences across professional groups; for some, protection of patient information is part of core professional ethics, while for others it is simply part of their occupational work, aligned with organizational interests.

This qualitative study of physicians, nurses, and health information professionals revealed some differences in views and practices for protecting patient information in the changing technological and legal context of health care that suggest some professional groups (doctors) may be more likely to resist such changes and others (health information professionals) will actively adopt them.

New technologies and regulations are changing how information is used in health care delivery, challenging professional practices for the control of patient information that may change the value or meaning of medical records for different professional groups.

Qualitative findings suggest that professional groups in health care vary in the extent of information control they have, as well in how they view such control. Some groups may be more likely to (be able to) resist changes in the professional control of information that stem from new technologies or regulatory policies. Some professionals recognize that new IT systems and regulations challenge existing social control of information in health care, with the potential to undermine (or possibly bolster) professional self-control for some but not necessarily all occupational groups.

Advanced education is often thought to respond to the demands of the economy, market forces create new occupations, and then universities respond with new degrees and curricula aimed at training future workers with specific new skills. Presented here is comparative research on an underappreciated, yet growing, concurrent alternative process: universities, with their global growth in numbers and enrollments, in concert with expanding research capacity, create and privilege knowledge and skills, legitimate new degrees that then become monetized and even required in private and public sectors of economies. A process referred to as academization of occupations has far-reaching implications for understanding the transformation of capitalism, new dimensions of social inequality, and resulting stratification among occupations. Academization is also eclipsing the more limited professionalization processes in occupations. Additionally, it fuels further expansion of advanced education and contributes to a new culture of work in the 21st century. Commissioned detailed German and US case studies of the university origins and influence on workplace consequences of seven selected occupations and associated knowledge, skills, and degrees investigate the academization process. And to demonstrate how universal this could become, the cases contrast the more open and less-restrictive education and occupation system in the US with the centralized and state-controlled education system in Germany. With expected variation, both economies and their occupational systems show evidence of robust academization. Importantly too is evidence of academic transformations of understandings about approaches to job tasks and use of authoritative knowledge in occupational activities.

This paper aims to examine and discuss learning conditions for teachers, in the context of choice and decentralisation reforms.

This article is based on analyses of 30 interviews with Swedish upper secondary teachers focusing on their experiences of their conditions for learning.

This paper shows how teachers at upper secondary level identify their subjects as the most important to learn more within. Secondly, we also show that spatial and temporal aspects of organisation of work seem to influence the conditions for subject learning, where the interviewees in many ways contrast their own view to how they describe their work being organised.

Our findings may have currency for other professional groups with similar governance-contexts, and teachers in other similar governance-contexts.

These findings indicate the need to further develop workplace learning strategies founded upon the understanding of schools as workplaces, taking occupational values into account. Furthermore, these strategies should be seen as a core Human Resource Management issue, as they can potentially enhance the work environment, thus increasing the profession’s attractiveness.

We show that spatial and temporal aspects of organisation of work seem to influence the conditions for the sought after subject learning, and that the teachers and the school management seem to identify with different and clashing ideals in terms of what, when, how and with whom to learn.

Career burnout is prevalent in the PR industry, precisely when demand for professionals is increasing. While career burnout has been included in studies and theorising on professionalism and feminisation, issues with turnover and burnout remain.

Using a grounded theory approach, this qualitative study draws upon the lived experiences of 30 current and former female Australian PR professionals to gain an understanding of how they perceive signs of career burnout and the factors that contribute to it.

Career burnout is an occupational syndrome whereby someone gradually morphs from being highly motivated in their role to emotionally exhausted, cynical and/or experiencing feelings of failure. It is a protracted response to chronic workplace demands and stressors, and includes three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and reduced personal accomplishment. It is specifically a workplace phenomenon, distinguished from anxiety and depression, which can emerge in any context.

A key contributor to career burnout were PR-specific workplace stressors that were perceived to stem from a lack of respect for, or understanding of, PR as a profession. The stressors included the need to‘prove the spend’of PR, unreasonable deadlines, clients disregarding advice or counsel, as well as broader societal perceptions of PR as ‘spin doctors’. This often led to the PR practitioner undertaking work that went against their own advice or resulted in unsuccessful organisational outcomes they felt could have been avoided had their advice been listened to and valued. The workplace factors contributing to burnout overlap in complex ways and the study supports the idea that burnout is a product of situational contexts, despite being acutely felt at the individual level.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and theoretically explain how line managers and lower-status experts work together in public health-care organizations. Hence, this study explores how lower-status experts influence line managers' decision-making and task prioritizing in order to guide staff experts' cooperation and performance improvements.

The authors used a qualitative method for data collection and analysis of the experts' and line managers' explanations about their cooperation. A theoretical approach of experts' identity positioning, in terms of differences and similarities, was used in analyzing the interaction between managers and experts.

This study shows that similarities and differences in positioning acts exist simultaneously. Similarity is constructed by way of strategic and professional alignment with the line managers' core tasks. Differences stem from the distinction between knowledge-grounded skills and professional attributes such as language, analytical tools, and jargon. Lower-status experts need to leave their entrenched positions and match the professional status of line managers in both knowledge aspirations and appearance to reach a respected approach of experts' identity positioning.

Unlike many previous studies, this study demonstrates that similarities and differences in positioning acts exist simultaneously.

This research attempts to make sense of the experiences of two academic women who become mothers.

This paper is an autoethnography. Applying the autoethnographic method allows us to discuss cultural phenomena through personal reflections and experiences. Our autoethnographic reflections illustrate our struggles and attempts of resistance within discursive spaces where motherhood and our identity as academics intersect.

Our personal experiences combined with theoretical elaborations illuminate how the role of the mother continues to be dominated by such gendered discursive practices that conflict with the work role. Once women become mothers, they are othered through societal and organizational practices because they constitute a visible deviation from the masculine norm in the organizational setting, academia included.

This paper explores how contemporary motherhood discourse(s)within academia and the wider society present competing truth claims, embedded in neoliberal and postfeminist cultural sensibility. Our autoethnographic reflections show our struggles and attempts of resistance within such discursive spaces.