Marlot Kuiper

33 The challenge of working with checklists 1.8 Contributions of this study With this dissertation, I contribute to theoretical, methodological and practical debates. Theoretical contributions First of all, with this study I contribute to current debates about developments in and around professional work. Trends like multi-problem cases, increasing specialization, technological advancement and budgetary restraint, call for new forms or organisation, coordination and collaboration within and between professional domains (Evetts, 2011; Noordegraaf, 2007, 2011, 2016). As argued, Sociology of Professions literature mostly concentrates around the ‘big’ stories of how professionals oppose to, or are circumscribed by, external pressures. This tendency leads to an impasse and a disregard of analyses of the more gradual changes. With an in-depth analysis of how professionals work with a specific standard, I make visible how professional and organisational logics are increasingly connected in the actual execution of professional work. By adopting a micro-level perspective, I provide insights into how professionals within organisational environments actually give shape to new standards in the everyday course of their work. In doing so, I provide more nuanced explanations than macro-oriented studies that compare bigger discourses like ‘professions’ and ‘organisations’ that mostly emphasize conflict. Secondly, drawing from Routine Theory to build an analytical framework also allows me to further the literature on routines in various ways. The initial model of Pentland and Feldman (2005) that meant a breakthrough in thinking about routines as dynamic systems, has attracted considerable attention from various researchers. The past few years, many studies have therefore been conducted on internal routine dynamics (Feldman et al., 2016). With this new focus on routines as dynamic systems though, routine interactions and the role of artefacts in (re)creating routines have remained understudied (Feldman et al., 2016; see D’Adderio (2011), Sele & Grand (2016) and Spee et al., (2016) for a few insightful exceptions). In this dissertation I expand the analytical framework, to explicitly consider these relations. I provide rich empirical illustrations of how routines interact (chapter 6) and how artefacts influence the (re)creation of routines (chapter 7). This case study in a highly professionalised domain that was informed by literature form the Sociology of Professions, is helpful in elucidating explanatory mechanisms for (not) changing routines. 1