Conference Agenda

The academic debate on roles of public professionals such as medical doctors, teachers and police officers in tackling societal issues has generic overtones. It tends to draw on (empirical) work in large countries and identifies the bigger issues and bigger patterns in service delivery. In this paper, we provide a more grounded perspective on professional work, in distinctive contexts, specifically those of small islands. We do so to get a grip on the reality and variety of how public professionals respond to sudden shifts, surprises and sentiments, or societal turbulence, in service situations that are characterized by vulnerable operational capacities and challenging authorizing environments. Small island contexts serve as critical cases: their characteristics, including geographic isolation, limited resources and closed social networks, affect professional acts and behaviors, whilst these acts and behaviors are important to tackle turbulent challenges related to safety, security, public health and migration. We analyze professional navigation tactics, which are adaptive acts that public professionals employ to render services in turbulent times. Empirically, we focus on police officers and social workers in Aruba, a constituent island country in the Dutch Kingdom, located in the Southern Caribbean Sea. Our findings shed light on grounded professional acts and highlight how professional navigation does not occur in isolation in small island contexts, within multi-level or layered governance arrangements. Instead, ‘networked navigation’ emerges in such landscapes. We conclude that the conditions for dealing with turbulence are highly turbulent themselves, and that vital connections between professionals and their surroundings, including clients, colleagues and institutions, are pivotal. At the end, we discuss findings and sketch academic and practical implications.

Bernando Zacka’s book When the State Meets the Street (2017) develops a theory of street-level bureaucrats’ practice that emphasizes the limits of bureaucratic logics and need for individual moral reasoning. Hard and fast rules run out when practitioners reason about adequate solutions to their challenges. But is there nevertheless a public role that delivers standards of responsible reasoning beyond bureaucratic rules? This article claims that the kinds of cases Zacka draws on can and should be reinterpreted with a perspective of professionalism. This perspective sees street-level reasoning as guided by a mission-based role that integrates a broad range of concerns. By systematically investigating five key aspects of frontline practice—knowledge, discretion, principles, deliberation, and responsibility—the article explains why a professional theory is relevant for both analytical and normative purposes. Although the organizational context of street-level practice is multidimensional and unpredictable, a perspective of professionalism clarifies the potential for making sense of experiences and judgments as a form of role-based reasoning that undergirds shared and justifiable practice.