Conference Agenda

You must feel the pulse: Rethinking connectivity and connected professionalism through familiar and explorative engagement, focusing on place and work

Mathilde Hjerrild Carlsen, postdoc at Copenhagen Business School and

Anne Reff Pedersen, Professor at Copenhagen Business School

In a society shaped by a new geopolitical landscape in Europe and increasing pressure from the West to challenge national borders, public uncertainty (Bromfield, 2024) has become a constant aspect of daily life for both professionals and citizens, particularly in welfare contexts. One way to build resilience in public governance (Dudau, Masou, Murdock, & Hunter, 2023) is by strengthening local communities and enhancing collaboration within them. This study explores how public schools in Denmark collaborate with private companies on STEM education, an area crucial for developing future competencies that can bolster a more autonomous Europe by reducing dependence on foreign technology.

To explain connections or failure of connections in the literature on connective professionalism it is necessary to shift the focus away from professional groups and instead examine the relationships and interactions between them (Adams, Kirkpatrick, Tolbert, & Waring, 2020; Kanon & Andersson, 2023). However, few studies have incorporated the concept of engagement to explain how these connections are maintained. In public welfare collaborations, the outcomes are often broad and visionary, making values difficult to measure. Therefore, it becomes essential to integrate elements like engagement to shed light on the relational aspects that help build resilience in these collaborations.

The empirical case for this study focuses on the collaboration between connective professionals in Danish small and medium-sized companies and teachers in public primary and lower-secondary STEM education. This case provides an ideal context for examining resilience and connections in public-private partnerships. The data for this study was gathered from qualitative observations and interviews. The findings reveal that professionals’ connective work is not only strategic and justifying but also rooted in familiar forms of engagement. These types of engagement play a pivotal role in establishing new connections that are local, situational, and, in some cases, informed by sensory information. The use of diverse engagement strategies strengthens collaboration, fostering more resilient local communities between private companies and public schools. But the study also shows that a limited reliance on only familiar engagement makes the collaboration more vulnerable.

This study contributes to the field of welfare management and professions by examining how different forms of engagement in local STEM collaborations can enhance resilience within communities. Drawing on the concepts of engagement (Thévenot, 2006, 2007), connectivity (Noordegraaf & Brock, 2021), and public value (Osborne, 2020, 2024), we analyse various engagement strategies and discuss their potential and challenges in building local community resilience. In doing so, this research expands the understanding of connected professionalism and welfare collaborations by exploring how local collaborations in STEM education create public value and how connected professionals can become more resilient by employing diverse engagement strategies in these partnerships.

Resilience has become a prominent and intensively discussed concept. At its core, it promises insights into the capacity of systems to anticipate and absorb disturbances, adapt to them and transform itself to retain functions and identity. The concept has not only attracted researchers from different disciplines but also policy actors on the national and international level. A more critical strand of literature emphasizes the normative implications of the resilience discourse, the implicit values and ‘unavoidable politics of knowledge, uncertainty and ignorance’ (Feindt et al. 2020) associated with it.

This paper takes the critical approach as its starting point and analyses the discursive career of resilience from a comparative policy perspective. Focussing on ethical advisory constellations across three countries (UK, AUS, GER) and two policy nexus areas (health/climate and health/AI) it aims at identifying the multiple meanings resilience might take and seeks to reconstruct its political, normative and moral implications. Ethical advice for policymakers has turned out to be a crucial case for understanding how and under which structural conditions epistemic and evaluative claims are interlinked and translated into policymaking.

The paper is based on two assumptions: first, resilience as an ‘essentially contested concept’ (Gallie) has already become a discursive resource for competing actor groups within this policy nexus areas to justify their normative standards, moral principles and value claims under conditions of uncertainty. Second, the cultures of professionalization and expertise within both countries and policy nexus areas shape the ways these claims are made and the modes of how resilience is used as justification for both ethical and policy principles.

By comparing how resilience enters ethics advice, the paper contributes to both an empirical and theoretical understanding of the discursive dynamics and interplay of scientific and moral questions in welfare-related policy processes and societal transformations. It draws on 60 semi-structured interviews and several focus group discussions carried out in 2024-25 with individuals and representatives of organisations which have provided advice on ethics or responsible regulation and innovation to the UK, German or Australian governments, and civil servants who have sought such advice.

Having the core task of helping unemployed people to find work, the Public Employment Service is strongly affected by crises that stem from economic and social developments. Its’ employees, especially street-level bureaucrats, who work in direct contact with citizens, play a key role for whether the organization succeeds in performing its’ role in the face of everyday challenges as well as acute shocks.

Based on qualitative interviews with employees in the Public Employment Service in Sweden and Germany, this paper investigates how their strategies for coping with effects of crises impact different dimensions of organizational resilience.

The paper finds that street-level bureaucrats experience crisis in a twofold way: On the one hand, their work is affected by social and economic crises, through for example rising unemployment numbers and by encountering clients with vulnerabilities. On the other hand, they perceive an additional layer of crisis that stems from frequent changes in labour market policies and organizational structures and that is marked by feelings of uncertainty.

The paper identifies different types of employees, that cope with these challenges in different ways. The humanists often consider the prevalent activation policies and working conditions to be unsuitable to adequately fulfil the organization’s tasks and to address the clients’ needs. They try to compensate for this through making extra efforts that follow an own professional notion of quality work. In contrast, the activators, consider activation policies as generally suitable to fulfil the organization’s tasks. However, in order to be able to implement them with conviction, they develop their own interpretations by drawing on personal values and life experiences. While the two types have different coping strategies, they both make strong efforts that go beyond what they are formally required to do. They, thereby, contribute to the organization’s everyday resilience, that allows it to respond to chronic everyday challenges (Barasa et al.,2018:500).

Paradoxically, the strength in this dimension of resilience is linked to problems in other dimensions. Adaptive resilience occurs when organizations develop new capacities in response to emergent situations, while planned resilience refers to precautions that are taken ahead of a crisis (Barasa et al.,2018:497). Since the employees often overexert themselves in their efforts for everyday resilience, they have less capacity to contribute to the organization’s adaptive resilience. Furthermore, they feel that their efforts are often not valued by the organization and that their feedback is not sufficiently taken into account in change processes. Thus, while the employees’ experiences with everyday resilience could be used in order to strengthen planned resilience, this potential is often left unused.

Literature:

Barasa, E., Mbau, R., & Gilson, L. (2018). What is resilience and how can it be nurtured? A systematic review of empirical literature on organizational resilience. International journal of health policy and management, 7(6), 491-503.

Over the last two decades, the impact of a growing number of polycrises can be felt in terms of rising levels of inequalities, increased vulnerabilities and political polarisation, which influence the delivery of welfare services. The relationship between resilience and societal values remains ambiguous but societal values do play a role in guiding the learning that is drawn from a crisis. Zhang, Kong (2025) argue that resilience in a disaster can be improved by involving many stakeholders in the process of learning through crisis. This raises further questions about who defines the learning from a crisis, particularly which groups and how these groups resolve their differences. Muspratt-Palmer et al (2024) concluded that the process of learning is as important as the learning itself.

This paper will develop a case study of how the lessons of COVID-19 in the UK are being gathered through the process of the Public Inquiry, which was set up to “examine, consider and report on preparations and the response to the pandemic in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, up to and including the Inquiry’s formal setting-up date, 28 June 2022” (Covid19 Public Inquiry, 2022).

If crisis learning is divided into the learning emphasized by different stakeholders, the research question “How did each stakeholder address issues of uncertainty, risk and complexity?” provides a framework for analysing this learning.

The case study will examine the opportunities and barriers to learning as well as some of the learning processes. It will highlight the different perspectives of government, politicians, scientists, NHS, citizens and other stakeholders. This will be complemented by a range of other sources of information gathered at the beginning of the pandemic, which aimed to identify new ways of working. It will conclude with an assessment of the extent of the shared learning identified five years after the beginning of the pandemic.