Marlot Kuiper

53 Standardization in professional settings own position. Rather, contemporary research efforts aim to overcome the divide between ‘organisations’ and ‘professionals’ (McGivern et al., 2015; Noordegraaf, 2011) even with theorizations ‘beyond hybridity’ in which such a mingling of logics becomes ‘natural’ (Noordegraaf, 2015; Postma, Oldenhof, & Putters, 2015). From this perspective, ‘organising’ becomes part of professionalism, so professionals can deal with contemporary demands and legitimize performances in demanding environments. Nonetheless, this rather new theorization needs more development, backed by empirical evidence. There is an urgent call to study on a micro-level how professionals within organisational environments actually give shape to new standards and arrangements in the everyday course of their work (e.g. Wallenburg et al., 2016; Waring & Bishop 2013). The question thus remains: as we theorize professionalism as a mingling of different logics, what does it look like in practice? In order to provide detailed accounts of the mingling of these logics, I will closely look at how one of the specifics associated with an organisation logic - standardization – mingles with a professional logic. In the next paragraph, I’ll introduce standards, and safety checklists in particular, as organised response to deal with complexities in demanding environments. 2.3 Standards and standardization “Checklists are not Harry Potter’s wand”- Pronovost quoted by Laurance (2009) Over the last decades, standardization really did take off in professional work settings, especially within the medical domain. This section concentrates on the question: “What are standards and medical checklists, and what is their purpose and (intentional) professional usage?” The underlying reasons for standardization are multiple, though the most reported impetus for standardization is ‘quality improvement’, which is usually referred to as making practices more efficient, reducing variability in service delivery, and dealing with increasing complexity and uncertainty (Timmermans and Berg, 2003). Timmermans and Epstein (2010, p. 70) state that “it is easy to observe how life increasingly depends on the creation, institutionalization, use and dissemination of diverse kinds of standards.” The idea of standardization as a mechanism to improve efficiency is nothing new though. Probably the most 2