Marlot Kuiper

29 The challenge of working with checklists What are professionals and what is professional work, and what transitions can be identified? (chapter 2) The first theoretical question concentrates on the specific nature of professional work. I will discuss how professional work is organised and legitimized, what professional norms and values guide professional work, and how ‘appropriate behaviours’ are taught during professional socialization. Thereafter, I will identify important transitions in professional work, and consequences for conceptualizations of ‘professionalism’. What are standards and medical checklists, and what is their purpose and (intentional) professional usage? (chapter 2) With this question I aim to demarcate the concepts ‘standard’ and ‘checklist’. By drawing from different bodies of literature, I will define the concepts and gain knowledge of current academic debates about the nature and purpose of checklists, and their intentional use by surgical teams. How can we conceptualize linkages between professionals and standards? (chapter 2) The final theoretical question covers the relation between the core concepts. In the final part of the theoretical chapter, I will shed light on the different perspectives towards standards, and their hypothesized effects on professional work. I will explain how we can consider standardization of professional work procedures (by means of a checklist) as a mingling of professional and organisational logics. Various pressures in- and external to the professions have led to new conceptualizations like ‘hybrid’ or ‘organised’ professionalism. In the final section of the theoretical chapter I will explain how a safety team checklist can be considered an organised response to pressures on professional work. This mingling of professional and organisational logics will be the focus of the empirical study. What are organisational routines and how can they be used to study (professional) work and its standardization (chapter 3) With this question I work towards a research perspective that fits the research question. By combining Routine Theory with insights from for example the 1