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- Start date
- Duration
- Format
- Language
- 9 Sep 2024
- 3,5 Days
- Class
- English
Understanding the global political landscape, and developing strategies that are adaptable to the ever-changing nature of global politics.
Knowledge is the essential element that guides professionals in their work and forms the foundations for the inferential processes that enable them, as experts, to find solutions to problems. Knowledge also provides the basis for their claims of competence in performing tasks, and justifies them in asserting status and commanding authority. This centrality of knowledge attests to the cognitive-rational aspect of professionalism, and impacts individual professionals profoundly.
So when tackling complex, ambiguous problems, knowledge is what allows professionals to act with some degree of certainty and rationality. This being the case, it’s likely that when faced with a knowledge disruption, their reactions are intense. By knowledge disruptions, we mean events or long-term societal changes that cast doubt on a professional’s knowledge.
Prior theory focused on knowledge disruptions that arise when an alternative body of knowledge emerges. In these cases, when professionals discover that their knowledge is clearly inadequate, and their authority and the effectiveness of their skills are compromised, they respond essentially by leveraging two mechanisms:
Another possibility is that knowledge interruptions could occur, which again call into question the adequacy of a professional’s knowledge, but without any alternative body of knowledge emerging at the same time. Examples would be societal challenges such as major threats to public health, economic recessions, or long-term natural changes. These are knowledge interruptions characterized by radical uncertainty that is difficult to mitigate, fraught with complexities, which evolves in a non-linear manner. In similar scenarios, professional specialized knowledge proves to be entirely inadequate.
The Covid-19 pandemic is just such a case of knowledge disruption: an unforeseeable event, which is complex both in its causes and in its repercussions on the economy, the environment, and society. The non-linear evolution of this knowledge disruption makes it hard to predict, and as such, intrinsically difficult to resolve.
Our research is based on an in-depth investigation of how certain physicians dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy in 2020. (The first cases of Covid in a Western country were detected in Italy.) We carried out our study in one of the biggest hospitals in Milan, in the region of Lombardy, a research-intensive teaching hospital with 600 beds. This hospital was converted into a medical center specialized in Covid-19, intaking patients from all over the region, and the physicians who worked there were the among the first to experience and respond to the knowledge interruption triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic in their workplace.
To reconstruct the complex social context that doctors found themselves working in during the initial outbreak of the pandemic, we triangulated the different sources of primary and secondary data.
We moved iteratively through the data, the emerging theories, and the literature, following a gradual abstraction approach that consisted of four steps:
Our inductive analysis of the responses of Italian physicians brought to light not only the fact that they lacked the specialized knowledge they needed to diagnose and treat their patients, but also that they were experiencing negative epistemic emotions (emotions associated with knowledge and knowledge processes), along with a sense of moral duty as professionals (to treat patients). To compensate for the ineffectiveness of their knowledge-based work, the doctors utilized and prioritized a series of service-oriented practices, leaning into the collaborative and humanistic side of their work.
Our work describes the ways in which professionals responded to knowledge interruptions that arose from societal challenges that were so complex as to undermine the adequacy of their knowledge base. This study contributes to the literature on professions and organizations in two ways.
When professionals have no way to use knowledge-based strategies to mitigate the uncertainty generated by knowledge disruptions, they experience strong negative epistemic emotions. Yet in such a scenario, they seem to be driven by a higher sense of moral duty, and they embrace collaborative and humanistic service-oriented work practices (poles apart from their usual knowledge-centric approach). These practices are inspired by the need to fulfill their professional role of service, rather than by an understanding of professionalism anchored on knowledge and rationality.