Connective Enactment and Collective Accomplishment in Professional Practices

Working with others is key to professionalism but little attention has been given to how specific actions contribute to collective practices to secure shared ends in work. This essay considers how professionals’ actions connect with one another in distributed (multi-participant) work practices. Recently, Hopwood, Blomberg, Dahlberg and Abrant Dahlgren identified a new way of viewing how professionals in distributed practices coordinate their actions to accomplish shared ends, in terms of phenomena they describe as “connective enactments” and “collective accomplishments”. In this essay, we explore the possibility that these phenomena have far more general application than the cases studied by Hopwood et al. We use the theory of practice architectures to outline this more general account and test its viability in by examining a case of culinary services practices. This more generalised account may offer new ways to understand features of distributed work practices and enhance professional practice and learning.