Abstract

 The professional work carried out in third-sector organisations (welfare mixes) is especially relevant and topical given the complexity of the social problems they are asked to respond to and the new ways of organising work in the context of a knowledge-based society, which encourages greater social reflexivity in the pursuit of public interest goals. Em Portugal, the significant development of organisations geared towards social intervention has been manifested in the creation of associative organisations, at local and regional level, open to personalisation, participation, co-decision and support for disadvantaged social groups, although their sustainability is not consensual. In line with this, these organisations are closer to citizens and are therefore better placed to find less standardised and more flexible processes and solutions to social problems, as well as non-bureaucratic ways of providing services to users that are more sensitive to their social and cultural heterogeneity. This situation has led to more and more funding from the state, with the assumption that it will increase the quality and effectiveness of public policies. However, this dependence of third-sector organisations on the state is sometimes seen as an attempt to relieve the state of responsibility for the quality and universality of the social services provided, not least because of the current funding problems due to structural unemployment, demographic trends and the competitiveness of the global economy, and whose response has been found in neo-liberal measures, with the consequent outsourcing of public services to the Third Sector and the erosion of the symbolic capital of professional work associated with the precariousness of their employment relationships. \Professional work in third-sector organisations is carried out on a project basis, under the imposition of partnerships with the public sector, and within the framework of processes of social and symbolic deregulation of social institutions. These conditions require professionals to be able to deal with high levels of uncertainty regarding the diagnosis of problems and the effects of social interventions. These professionals, who have higher formal education and a multi-skilled profile - centred on the Social Sciences and Humanities - associated with new areas of professionalisation, mobilise knowledge and value systems that are subject to remote public control as to the effectiveness of service provision.
In most cases, this is salaried professional work, often in the form of service provision, which takes the form (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the profession in question) of reflexive activities: a reflexive-discursive activity of implementing public policy provisions and a reflexive-practical activity of ‘problem-solving’ in situations with service users. \nThe development of these two reflective dimensions of professional work requires forms of work - and consequently forms of data collection - that stimulate the explanation and formalisation of practical-experiential awareness and the critical capacity to re-contextualise the general principles and values of public policies in social interaction. \In this context, we propose to develop an ethnographic strategy for collecting and analysing data on professional knowledge and skills that highlights the subjectivisation and intelligibility of work in social interaction for the professional themselves, based on a detailed self-description of their activity and self-reflection on aspects of their activity observed by the researcher. It will also be essential to understand what socio-organisational conditions exist in the Third Sector that facilitate or inhibit (dis)continuities between reflexive-discursive and reflexive-practical skills, since it is known that both have different epistemologies - and therefore different ways of mobilising knowledge - and therefore the reflexivity of one type does not necessarily imply the development of the other. To this end, surveys will be carried out on the symbolic, technical and political power and autonomy that professionals have in the work context and which enables them to develop their knowledge and, as a result, the reflexive competences identified.\nBetter knowledge of how competencies, knowledge and autonomy can be equated in professional work will make valuable contributions to higher education institutions' ability to design better curricular plans and strategies for the courses on which professional work is based.

Funding

FCT Fundação para Ciência e Tecnologia
PTDC/CS-SOC/098459/2008

Keywords

Competências reflexivas
Etnografias do saber profissional
Organizações do Terceiro Sector
Trabalho profissional

Partners

CIIE / Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação da Universidade do Porto (FPCEUP) - Portugal
Centro de Estudos Transdisciplinares para o Desenvolvimento - Portugal
Centro de Investigação em Ciências Sociais - Universidade do Minho - Portugal
Núcleo Interdisciplinar de Estudos sobre Desigualdade (NIED) - Brasil
Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) - Portugal
Universidade do Minho (UM) - Portugal