Can the schism be bridged?

poor or unemployed are re-entering the public debate. The focus is shifted to underpinning private companies’ ability to compete. Likewise, one could point to a discourse of bio-political governmentality emphasizing the responsibility of the citizen in all fields (employment, health, education etc.). This individualization of responsibility becomes a decisive value in the public sector, and the population has over the years become used to “full freedom” and “full responsibility” (Beach, 2010, p. 555 – cf. also Beach, 2009 and Beach & Carlson, 2004).

Concerning point 4, the trend seems to be blurring the boundaries between professional standards and political intentions. The outcome is a sharpened demand for identification with the values of the leadership in the institutions and municipalities. One could speak of “the encircled institution” (Pedersen, 2011, p. 246), characterized by a number of governing and controlling systems (accountability etc.). We sum up what we label the discursive formations within this issue, namely, the discourse of performativity, the discourse of accountability, the discourse of standards (or commodification), and the discourse of surveillance and control (cf. Jensen & Walker, 2008, Ch. 10; Jensen & Jensen, 2007; Jensen &

Jensen, 2008).

many conflicts of interests, poor local conditions or traditions, ideologies and other issues did, in fact, hamper successful intervention. We intended to examine the improvements as well as barriers which has not been explored much in research, by using knowledge about the status of the institutions concerning various factors that are assumed to be of importance for working innovatively (organization, level of education of staff, working conditions, etc.). The interesting point was what the intervention showed. For professionals the most important single factor seemed to be “control over own working situation” (for a detailed description – see Jensen, 2012).

The intervention was based upon a principle of ‘soft’ evidence-based practice - i.e. innovation based on knowledge from selected research. The approach to evidence-based practice in the ACP project was embedded in theories of science, which assume that practice will change if a user perspective, that is, a perspective involving participants and ownership, becomes central (Sommerfeld, 2005). Fur-thermore, implementation research (Winter & Nielsen, 2008), theories on culture from a communication perspective and innovation research in working life (e.g.

Høyrup & Elkjaer, 2006) have documented that a plethora of other circumstances related to the processes of learning and knowing in work organizations can either restrict or promote an innovation and influence its effectiveness.

The qualification strategy was based on material developed by researchers - a so-called qualification package - that presents evidence-based knowledge about 1) socially endangered children, background variables, the concept of action competence, 2) effects of intervention based on international research and contra-indicative effects in relation to exclusion and 3) legislation in the field (educational learning plans and action plans in residential institutions). The evidence-based knowledge from these three areas was merged with a fourth field of knowledge, practitioners’ knowledge, consisting partly of explicit and implicit experiences from practice and partly of theoretical knowledge and common knowledge in the institution. These elements interacted with evidence-based “external” knowledge in selected fields of strategy (Schön, 1983). The exchange of these different fields of knowledge was supported by written material (an ACP “portfolio”), by analy-ses of the gap between pedagogues’ experiences of their own competences and children’s competences (“gap profiles”) and by local support and the facilitation of processes via consultants and courses, arranged and prepared by researchers.

The implementation of knowledge converted into a new practice furthermore demands a connection between user and research perspectives. This means that an intervention has to build upon and try to capture the knowledge needs of the professionals, and their need for attaining ownership of their own development processes and interests.

The approach of the project contrasted external forms of evidence in the fol-lowing way: instead of being controlled by methods solely, the intervention was both governed by theory and goals and had a joint overall aim of encouraging the pedagogues to develop their practice through their own competence analysis and practice analysis. The disadvantage of working on the basis of an open innovation design is that the method is carried out locally and therefore includes variations of the ASP vision, which must be taken into account when assessing the effect of the intervention. Overcoming this dilemma is not an easy task, but by drawing on and using data - in addition to the effect assessment - on the local processes, i.e.

institutional conditions, educational processes and the pedagogues’ competence development and their descriptions of their knowledge and learning processes, much of that problem was brought ‘under control’ (cf. Jensen, 2012). On the other hand, the advantage of developing a practice as an open and innovative design is that it to some extent overcomes the critique of replicating evidence-based practice in a manualized way.

The second example

A second example of developing professionalism could be to identify what good practice is, analyse its characteristics and use it as a standard or norm of social pedagogical efforts.

Good practice has become a key concept in evidence- and knowledge-based- ac-tivities aimed at changing social work practice. It is linked with the demand for knowledge- and evidence-based approaches, according to Julkunen and Korbonen (2008, p. 117).

The authors provide the reader with a critical and reflective process model consisting of four phases: identification, evaluation, condensation and transfer (ibid., p. 120 ff.). The model is not a novelty (cf. models in Redmond, 2006; White, Fook & Gardner, 2006; Boud et al., 2006; Fook & Gardner, 2007), but it stresses learning as a fundamental issue (e.g. in dissemination) and points to the theo-retical framework necessary for good practice by including public policy goals, programme-level goals, generative goals and workplace level goals (Julkunen

& Korbunen, 2008, p. 123). This idea is to some extent duplicated by Pawson &

Tilley, in particular concerning the nature of programmes (2009, p. 151-156).

The third example

A third example of contributing to a re-professionalization of the work of social pedagogues is linked with cooperative knowledge production (Gredig, 2005;

Hütteman & Sommerfeld, 2008, p. 164-167; Jensen, 2008). An important point here is to understand that the distinction between fundamental and applied research cannot be taken for granted anymore. The distinction has decreased as new forms of mode-2 knowledge have emerged (Nowotny, Scott & Gibbons, 2002). Knowl-edge processes in science and practice are assumed to have a cyclical structure.

Practice is thus not only regarded as a field of applying or consuming scientific knowledge, but as constituting a system of knowledge in itself. The science cycle and the practice cycle are seen as linked with each other for a limited period of time and in the form of common developmental projects. The main link is to deal with a practical problem that requires practitioners to leave their routines and start afresh with innovations. Exactly at this point they need scientific knowledge.

Without further elaborating this understanding it seems obvious that profession-als and academics may profit considerably from this cooperation (Hüttemann &

Sommerfeld, 2008, p. 165; Jensen, 2008, p. 29-31).

We will now sum up our reflections.