Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 1 (2012) 22–32

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Full length article

The role of common knowledge in achieving collaboration across practices Anne Edwards ⁎ OSAT, Oxford University Department of Education, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 22 March 2012 Accepted 27 March 2012 Available online 24 April 2012 Keywords: Inter-professional Common knowledge Relational expertise

a b s t r a c t Working across practice boundaries on complex societal problems is now commonplace. Yet we know relatively little about what enables it to happen successfully. One analytic challenge for studies of inter-professional work is to understand what mediates collaboration across the boundaries of practices so that what matters for each practice is still in play in the judgements that are made. The argument in this article is that attention should be paid to how what matters for each potentially collaborating practitioner is brought to bear on both interpreting and responding to work problems. Using the analytic resources of cultural–historical theory, three conceptual tools are presented. These tools, relational expertise, relational agency and common knowledge, are the outcome of analyses of inter-professional work in studies in England over the last ten years. They are offered as resources for both the analysis and development of cross-practice collaborations. The article presents evidence from three recent studies of creating the conditions for inter-professional collaborations in children's services to examine the construction and use of common knowledge as a resource for those tasked with service integration. Common knowledge is seen as comprising the motives that take forward each contributing practice. It is woven into continuously contestable organisational narratives. These mediate interactions across practice boundaries and give strategic direction to activities in and across services which are in the process of integration. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction I recently spent an afternoon walking around villages in rural France with an architect who had been involved in their restoration over several decades. His passion for stonework, sight lines and field systems was compelling. We visitors became engrossed, seeing things we had never previously noticed, finding new meanings in the familiar and trying to make connections with what we already knew about the local history. Some of us did not agree with his view that good restoration should be invisible, but we recognised his passion about what mattered for him and the expertise that he made explicit as he talked us through the processes of rebuilding. His expertise came from engagement in practices which were culturally formed with specific histories and values. However, he became anguished when recounting the problems he had with town planners. It was clear that when an architect tries to work with a town planner, what matters for each of them may not easily align, intentions get thwarted and frustrations result. It is what happens at the intersection of practices and the alignment of motives at these sites of intersection that are the core concerns of this article. The intention is to “delve into the miasma of the collective” as I once put it (Edwards, 2009a, 2009b, p. 202) in order to better understand the interactions that comprise collaborative inter-professional responses to complex problems. The focus is therefore the middle layer of analysis between the system and the individual and in particular the expertise which is exercised in relationships where specialist knowledge and skills are mobilised.

⁎ Tel.: + 44 1865 611001. E-mail address: [email protected]. 2210-6561/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.lcsi.2012.03.003

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The arguments offered are framed by a cultural historical understanding of practices, activities and actions, where practices are seen as historically accumulated, knowledge-laden, emotionally freighted and given direction by what is valued by those who inhabit them (Edwards, 2010). What matters most for practitioners mediates their identities as they take part in activities such as helping parents navigate the social care system, in practices such as social work. In these contexts, what matters orients their interpretations and responses as they tackle the problems they encounter in work activities. Emotion, as Dreyfus (2004) has observed, is therefore recognised as an element in expert decision-making. The analyses of interactions between expert practitioners that have led to the conceptual developments outlined in this paper have taken place in children's services in local authorities in England, at a time when efforts have been underway to build strong horizontal links between specialist practices. These services, such as social work and educational psychology, are currently reconfiguring their relationships with each other in order to offer seamless responses to the changing and often complex needs of vulnerable children and their families. The studies include a national evaluation of a government initiative aimed at promoting inter-professional work (Edwards, Barnes, Plewis, Morris, et al., 2006); research council funded studies Learning in and for Interagency Working (LIW) (Edwards, Daniels, Gallagher, Leadbetter, & Warmington, 2009) and how schools work with other agencies to prevent social exclusion (PSE) (Edwards, Lunt, & Stamou, 2010); a recent examination of knowledge mobilisation in children's services entitled Developing Interagency Working (DIW) (Edwards & Daniels, 2012); and two studies on leadership in children's services (Canwell, Hannan, Longfils, & Edwards, 2011; Daniels & Edwards, in press). The changes we studied reflect broader policy moves towards joined-up government over the last decade, suggesting that findings from children's services will have wider resonance. Mulgan has pointed to some of the challenges of the policy shift to networks and projects and away from “traditional structures” (2005, p. 179). These include the need for “horizontal structures [which] are essential to complement vertical ones” (p.184), and notes that ensuing erosions of autonomy are “almost certainly to be resisted” (p. 187). I suggest that Mulgan is half right about structures and he is certainly correct about resistance. The studies just listed lead to my point of departure: that creating new horizontally linking structures is not a sufficient response to these new demands, not least because of the ensuing resistance. Instead, attention needs to be paid to the work that is done to create fluid and responsive horizontal linkages between practices. Christensen and Laegreid (2007) get closer to the line I shall pursue. Horizontal working, they argue, needs ‘cooperative effort and cannot be easily imposed from the top down’ so that “The role of a successful reform agent is to operate more as a gardener than as an engineer or an architect” (Christensen & Laegreid, 2007,p. 1063). In this article I outline the development of some new gardening tools — relational expertise, common knowledge, and relational agency. I then discuss how creating common knowledge of what matters in each practice has emerged as a crucial resource for those who are making the shift to more horizontal linkages. A cultural historical view of expertise A cultural–historical account of expertise is based in the Vygotskian view of learning as a process of internalisation and externalisation, during which people reconfigure their relationships with the practices they inhabit. Importantly, learning or developing expertise in a practice is not a neutral process: it involves a dialectical engagement in activities where what matters for people as individuals is highlighted by them as they interpret and respond to the tasks they encounter. Here Leont'ev's ideas of “activity” as the unit of analysis and of “object of activity” as the focus of the activity become crucial. Leont'ev's argument was that taking activity as the unit of analysis allows a recognition that people's ‘needs, emotions and feelings’ are objectified in what they select to work on (1978a: 10). Discussing the object of activity, i.e. what is worked on in an activity, in terms of the objectification of motives in activities he explained: …the object of activity is twofold: first in its independent existence as subordinating to itself and transforming the activity of the subject; second, as an image of the object, as a product of its property of psychological reflection that is realized as an activity of the subject and cannot exist otherwise (Leont'ev, 1978a, p. 7). Equally, practices are not neutral spaces. Holland's analyses of the “figured worlds” in which identities are enacted (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) reveals how knowledge-laden and value-driven practices give rise to certain historically accumulated ways of interpreting and responding. They explain: By “figured world” then, we mean a socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others. Each is a simplified world populated by a set of agents … who engage in a limited range of meaningful acts… these collective ‘as if’ worlds are sociohistoric, contrived imaginations that mediate behavior and so…inform participants' outlooks (Holland et al., 1998, p. 52). The dialectic of the figured worlds of practices and people's interpretations and actions within them is central to how they become expert within practices. Drawing on the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) ladder of developing expertise, which runs in stages from novice through advanced beginner, competency and proficiency to expertise, Holland and her colleagues noted that in the final three steps in the ladder there is a qualitative change in the relationship between individual and system. This change is marked by a move from mainly following rules to devising one's own moves. In this analysis expertise is revealed in how the resources of the figured world are employed to carry out culturally-appropriate intentional actions, where actions are given direction by the culturally-valued motives which people appropriate as individuals.

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Personal engagement with the motives embedded in activities in practices appears to be a distinguishing aspect of expert work. Motives are neither simply internal nor only in the practices: they arise in people's engagement in activities in practices and their affiliation with what matters in those practices. Dreyfus discussed emotional engagement in activities as a sign of expertise: As the competent performer becomes more and more emotionally involved in a task, it becomes increasingly difficult for him or her to draw back and adopt the detached, rule-following stance of the beginner. If the detached stance of the novice and advanced beginner is replaced by involvement, and the learner accepts the anxiety of choice, he or she is set for further skill advancement. Then, the resulting positive and negative emotional experiences will strengthen successful perspectives and inhibit unsuccessful ones, and the performer's theory of the skill, as represented by rules and principles, will gradually be replaced by situational discriminations (Dreyfus, 2004, p. 179). This view is also reflected in Lave's culture-centred analysis that “priority, perspective and value are continuously and inescapably generated in activity” (1988, p. 181); and in Damasio's arguments on the intertwining of reason and emotion where “[W]ell-targeted and well-deployed emotion seems to be a support system without which the edifice of reason cannot operate properly” (1999, p. 42). The present focus is on the middle layer of interactions that is analytically located between the individual and the collective, a site where different motives and therefore different interpretations of the object of activity come into contact. The focus arises from an attempt to dig below Engeström's systemic analyses where he has described expertise as the “collaborative and discursive construction of tasks, solutions, visions, breakdowns and innovations” within and across systems rather than individual mastery of specific areas of relatively stable activity (Engeström & Middleton, 1996, p. 4). There expertise was presented as a collective attribute of a system, which is drawn upon to surface contradictions and to accomplish tasks. Engeström's account is reflected in the distributed nature of the expertise to be found in loosely interacting systems of practices such as children's services, but raises questions it doesn't tackle about what happens in the actual construction of tasks, solutions and so on. The Engeström and Middleton definition also reflects a view of a system as a bounded entity with recognisable relationships within it, which was not evident in the more fluid problem-oriented work we observed. Indeed Engeström's parallel work on “knotworking” as “… (a) rapidly pulsating, distributed, and partially improvised orchestration of collaborative performance between otherwise loosely connected actors and activity systems” (Engeström, 2008, p. 194) gets closer to the analytic challenges we faced. Knowledge and motives in practices The distributed nature of expertise in multi-professional children's services turns attention to how knowledge is mobilised across practices. Nowotny points to the dangers of aiming at the mere distribution of expertise because it might lead to a diluted form of hybridity. She sees diffused expertise as a potential problem because people can believe that the knowledge that seeps across boundaries is expert knowledge. Here Nowotny echoes our concerns in the PSE study about unqualified welfare workers in schools: that know-who can become a substitute for know-what (Edwards et al., 2010). For Nowotny the solution is new expert systems. She argues that “[E]xperts must now extend their knowledge, not simply to be an extension of what they know in their specialist field, but to consist of building links and trying to integrate what they know with what others want to, or should know and do” (Nowotny, 2003, p. 155). In this statement Nowotny outlines the demands of task-focused relational work across practice boundaries. In discussing cross boundary collaborations I am aware of hierarchies that serve to exclude (Callon, Lascoumes, & Barthe, 2011). A cultural historical view of collaboration recognises these concerns (Daniels & Warmington, 2007). At the same time a relational view of expertise, not only reflects the complex practices we have studied, but offers a set of tools to interrogate and develop inter-professional collaboration and negotiations with service users. That is, following Nowotny, “to integrate” what professionals know “with what others want to, or should know and do.” Here the relational emphasis in expertise also connects with broader concerns of “public value” and “closer linking of users and producers in creative joint development of products and services tailor-made to meet unmet human need–co-creation of public value.” (Benington, 2010, p. 45). A cultural historical view of the knowledge and skills that comprise expertise sees knowledge as, at least in part, a capability produced and reproduced in recurrent social practices' and ‘always in the making’ (Orlikowski, 2006: 460). It is a view reflected in Leont'ev's admiration for the connection that Marx made between cognition and practice. A profound revolution brought about by Marx in the theory of cognition is the idea that human practice is the basis for human cognition; practice is that process in the course of whose development cognitive problems arise, human perceptions and thought originate and develop, and which at the same time contains in itself criteria of the adequacy and truth of knowledge…(Leont'ev, 1978b, p. 2) Leont'ev's own development of the idea of the object of activity which not only objectifies what it is that is worked on in an activity, but also the needs, emotions and feelings associated with it, takes Marx's focus on practices much further. It recognises that objects of activity exhibit a motivating force which actors might recognise in different ways; and reminds us that the relationship between subject and object is never direct, but is always mediated by the knowledge and values that matter in a practice. We now know a great deal about how these mediating devices, and particularly socially generated categories in talk, shape the norms of practice and lead to particular forms of task accomplishment in specific settings (Mäkitalo, 2003; Mäkitalo & Säljö, 2002;

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Middleton, 2009); but we know relatively little about what the categories that are used in work talk tell us of the values and the knowledge that matters within particular practices. The practices in which expertise of the kind outlined by Dreyfus (2004) is enacted are practices where problems, and the responses to them, are not routine, but involve judgement; while working across practice boundaries amplifies the non-routine nature of responses. When practice norms are called into question in collaborations across professional practice boundaries, as they were between the Perigord architect and town planner, what matters for each needs to be mediated so that each can recognise what is important for the other and why. Analyses of specific professional work therefore call for conceptual tools which can reveal what knowledge is used and why it is used as judgements are made. One analytic challenge for studies of interprofessional work is to understand what mediates collaboration across the boundaries of practices so that what matters for each practice is still in play in the judgements that are made. First let us examine knowledge that matters in specific practices. Knorr Cetina's studies of research scientists' engagement with what she termed “epistemic objects” reflect the French architect's efforts to reproduce the sight lines that were crucial to the villages' earlier function as bastides [fortified villages]. These objects are not simple equivalents to objects of activity. Instead, they are a feature of what Knorr Cetina describes as the knowledge work that occurs when people are engaged with problems of practice and come to understand them better, shaping and reshaping new-for-them knowledge objects in the process. When discussing the practices of research scientists, she described such engagement as forms of “engrossment and excitement” (2001, p. 175), while they worked on an unfolding knowledge or epistemic object as they carried out their research. Expert knowledge within discrete practices in children's services was tacitly held and taken for granted as, unlike the research scientists, these professionals were not doing knowledge work. However, as inter-professional work increased, the knowledge that mattered to the social worker or educational psychologist needed to be articulated and justified to others. They could no longer rely on the “ready to hand conceptual tools” (Knorr Cetina, 1997, p. 10) that sustained their everyday work in familiar practices, but had to make visible what mattered for them or, in Knorr Cetina's terms, what it was that engaged and engrossed them as professionals. The idea of engrossment is elaborated in her study of how traders in investment banks work with the market as an object of “attachment” (Knorr Cetina & Brueggar, 2002). There the market is seen as an object of knowledge which is unfolding and engaging those who work on it, not just to understand it, but also to test, move and manipulate it and be stimulated by how it generates questions. Engagement arises through practitioners' need to work continually on the object of knowledge and define it. Relational expertise and common knowledge Relational expertise involves recognising what engrosses others, taking their standpoint and mutually aligning motives so that engagement continues (Edwards, 2010; 2011). This definition highlights the motives that are to be found in the knowledge that matters in different practices whether family networks for social workers or curriculum for teachers. These very different conceptual tools for interpreting a child's trajectory as a Leont'evian object of activity could impede taking the standpoint of the other and the alignment of motives. Yet in every study, we observed efforts at alignment that grew out of growing understandings of what mattered for each profession. Interpretations of problems and alignments of practices were mediated by common knowledge which was made up of what mattered for each collaborating professional. Common knowledge not a new term: Middleton (1996), in his analyses of team working in medical settings, found that common knowledge, based on shared experiences within team practices, offered resources for rapid joint decision-making; while D. Edwards and Mercer (1987) have written about the importance of developing common knowledge or shared understandings as the basis for successful classroom teaching. They argued the sociocultural line that “we must now seek the essence of human thought in its cultural nature, its communicability, in our transactions with other people” (p. 165); and described its construction as: “[T]he expression of stance and counter-stance … a negotiative depiction of education, a rhetorical, argumentative meeting of minds…” (p. 164). However, it is Carlile's (2004) use of common knowledge as a resource for mobilising knowledge across practice boundaries that has most resonance with our work on inter-professional collaborations. He found that knowledge held in common was particularly helpful in linking sub-units within the semi-conductor industry so that knowledge could be managed across boundaries to provoke innovation. He made a distinction between what he termed transfer, translation and transformation when knowledge enters new practices, and linked this distinction to how knowledge was mediated across boundaries by drawing on the knowledge that was held in common. He argued that the key to knowledge mobilisation is the “capacity of the common knowledge to represent the differences and dependencies now of consequence and the ability of the actors involved to use it” (2004, p. 557). He suggested that when the difference between what is known and what is new increases, the demands on the knowledge held in common, and therefore the difficulty in working with the new knowledge, also increase. Accordingly, simple transfer across practice boundaries may be possible when new ideas are not too distant from existing specialist knowledge in a practice, such as when a paediatrician talks to a family doctor about a new treatment; but some translation may be needed when the doctor then talks about the treatment with the child's parents and discusses it in relation to the symptoms they are both familiar with. However, domain specific knowledge may need to be transformed if it is to take on radically new ways of thinking such as when a new focus on children's mental health is introduced into curriculum-oriented schools. This argument therefore suggests that building common knowledge which enables quick transfer or makes translation easy, is an important prerequisite to quick and responsive relational work.

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In each of the cross-boundary discussions listed in the previous paragraph, motives are articulated as positions are explained. Enough is revealed to negotiate a meeting of minds based on a shared understanding of what matters for each of them. The knowledge of what matters, consequently held in common, is then able to mediate action when the doctor and parents respond to the child's needs. However, common knowledge needs nurturing: it is gardener's work (Christensen & Laegreid, 2007). Elsewhere, drawing on the children's services studies, I have argued that it is generated in sites of intersecting practices in talk about potentially shared objects of activity where purposes and intentions, and therefore what matters, are made explicit (Edwards, 2010). Relational expertise therefore involves building, contributing to and working with common knowledge. It is different from “interactional expertise” (Collins, 2004). Collins' question is “How much scientific knowledge do you need to have in order to do the sociology of a scientific domain?” (2004, p. 127). His response has been to differentiate between being able to use relevant professional language and also to do the job which he terms “contributory expertise”; and being able to use the language in conversations with others, which he calls interactional expertise. One can learn to speak the language through immersion in the practice community, without being able to carry out work tasks. Relational expertise, on the other hand, does not involve immersion, nor does it involve the capacity to understand the work of another. Instead, it is a matter of recognising what others can offer a shared enterprise and why they offer it; and being able to work with what others offer while also making visible and accessible what matters for you. Agency and mediated action Judgement in professional practices involves personal agency in interpreting problems, responding and then evaluating actions and outcomes. Inter-professional collaborations, however, call for the exercise of relational agency which, as I have explained elsewhere (Edwards, 2005, 2009b, 2010) is a capacity that can emerge in a two stage process within a constant dynamic as people engage together in activities. It involves: (i) working with others to expand the object of activity so that its complexity is revealed, by recognising the motives and the resources that others bring to bear as they too interpret it. (ii) aligning one's own responses to the newly enhanced interpretations, with the responses being made by the other professionals as they act on the expanded object. This view of agency owes a great deal to Taylor's concern that individual agency needs to be understood within a framework which includes sets of moral goals that aim at the wellbeing of others as well as ourselves. Outlining the tensions in modern life that arise from our being simultaneously agentic by acting on and shaping the world and conventionally engaged with what matters for others, he argues that “these demands may be in tension has to be allowed. But what must be wrong is a simple privileging of one over the other” (Taylor, 1991, p-66). Taylor's account of the interaction between creativity and moral purpose lies at the core of how professionals exercise agency as they work with others; and is at the heart of the alignment work of leaders of complex organisations such as children's services. The arguments presented so far suggest that a child's trajectory (or other object of inter-professional activity) is interpreted in ways which are mediated by the concepts that matter for each profession, with the result that the social worker may focus on safety while the psychologist on mental stability. These different concepts contribute to expanding the object of activity for all the professionals involved. Ideally, the enhanced object of activity is then responded to in a way that reflects and respects the expertise that led to its expansion. The mutual attunements of interpretations and responses are mediated by and contribute to the common knowledge built up between professionals. The picture I have just painted makes no mention of strongly argued contestation or displays of power. There was certainly evidence of both in all of the studies on which this work has been based; but the concern here is to understand better what comprises the common knowledge that mediates collaboration across practices, how it is built and how it is used. Conceptual work and Vygotskian research The creation of relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency as conceptual gardening tools, which can both analyse and work on horizontal linkages across practices, has been a Vygotskian quest. Vygotsky before his death in 1934 was preoccupied with what he termed the crisis in psychology (Vygotsky, 1987). For him the problem lay with the discipline's distance from the field and from its lack of reflective awareness of the theoretical frameworks it used. Vygotsky's own work was close to the field and driven by educational concerns. It was so ground-breaking because his methodology allowed him to be surprised by evidence as, in his terms, he limped towards the truth seeking to understand traces, influences and meanings. Shotter has highlighted Vygotsky's preoccupations and tentativeness, arguing that research should be future-oriented, that we should look closely at the everyday, be open to new language games, their ambiguities and their origins in joint action (Shotter, 1993, 2001). He calls attention to the indeterminacy of our worlds, the shifting nature of our practices and to the need for methodologies which involve looking closely at the everyday to examine how it is being constructed. The studies listed earlier have been constructed to be close to practice and, following Nowotny, to be alert to “what others want to, or should know and do” (p. 155). This approach to research is forward-looking, attempting to discern and test concepts that may be of use in working in and on the world and very much in line with Vygotsky's intention to develop a Marxist psychology that might be a resource for improving society. His was without doubt a modernist programme.

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All three concepts discussed in this paper have therefore been work in progress over the last ten years as they are tested in the field alongside practitioners who are involved in sense-making and in weaving their interpretations into the shaping of public meaning-making. The focus here is common knowledge: the construction of the knowledge that underpins the exercise of relational expertise and mediates relational agency. The earlier studies have told us that collaborations are built through understanding the ‘whys’ and ‘where tos’ of practice. It is not enough to focus only on how a social worker and a teacher work with a child, exchange information and so on; understanding why they are working with the child is crucial. Here is a practitioner in the national evaluation study (Edwards et al., 2006). I think the very first step is understanding about what the sort of issues are…. Professions have very, very different ideas about need, about discipline, about responsibility, about the impact of systems on families…So I think the first step is actually to get some shared understanding about effective practices and about understanding the reasons behind some of them. Understanding some of the reasons why we are seeing these sorts of issues in families. This understanding was also crucial at a strategic level. Here is a children's service director from the DIW study. I think it goes back to how you build alliances, and do you build relationships first and get people to understand what you're about and understand what they're about. And you might be describing it in a different way but you mean the same thing. Both of these extracts suggest a parallel process of personal sense-making and public meaning-making in which the motives that shape the different practices are woven into goal-directed public narratives that provide some cohesion to the fluid and responsive exercise of relational expertise across practice boundaries. But what is the common knowledge that mediates interprofessional collaborations and how is it constructed and used? The research The discussion will draw on three studies undertaken within 18 months in 2010–2012. During this period senior leaders in children's services in England were charged with bringing together separate services such as social work and educational psychology so that they could work together to understand the complexity of a child's trajectory towards risk and to respond to it. Their leadership task therefore involved enabling people from different professions, with no history of common knowledge, to work across often deeply entrenched professional boundaries. They were therefore being required to do gardening work i.e. building linkages between services to create child-centred systems oriented towards good outcomes for children, young people and their families. The first study is Developing Interagency Working (DIW ) which was funded by the Local Government Association to use Developmental Work Research (DWR) (Engeström, 2007) in order to help senior children's service practitioners interrogate their own practices as they reshaped the ways services worked together (Edwards & Daniels, 2012). The second study, Resourceful Leadership (RL), was funded by the English National College, an organisation that focuses on senior leadership in schools and children's services, to examine the knowledge, skills and attitudes of senior leaders in children's services (Canwell et al., 2011). Working with notions of distributed expertise, its analysis labelled successful leadership as resourceful practice, able to recognise and work with the knowledge and skills in the systems they were trying to change. The third study Leading the Learning (LL), also funded by the National College, asked what actions resourceful leaders of children's services took in everyday activities to build capacity in their organisations in order to take forward their strategic intentions (Daniels & Edwards, in press). All three studies examined the activities of senior leaders in children's services using the analytic tools of cultural historical theory. DIW consisted of three in-depth longitudinal case studies of local authority children's services. Each system of services for children was seen as an activity system and the study employed interviews and DWR methods with 33 senior staff. RL involved eight authorities in longitudinal case studies which were framed by activity theory. It used interviews and a DWRframed feedback session with each local authority and involved 48 senior staff. LL involved intensive work with ten Directors of Children's Services (DCS) to gather weekly data over two months on their actions in activities and how these related to their strategic intentions. These data sets then informed interviews with them. The study was framed by Hedegaard's distinction between (a) institutional practices shaped by historically accumulated motives, (b) activity settings and activities within these practices and (c) people's actions in activities in these settings (Edwards, 2010; Hedegaard, 2012). The data and discussion presented here are a cross-project analysis of how common knowledge was built by senior leaders and were used as a resource for integrated working. 1. Planning for common knowledge while reconfiguring services Common knowledge, was constructed as a shared understanding of the ‘whys’ of practice and was used as a resource for further action. In the first set of extracts, from the DIW study, it is first employed as a resource to bring people together and then as something that needs to be created to enable collaboration. The extracts are from the second of two DWR sessions with senior leaders in children's services and head teachers in one large English county. The authority was about to set up seven localitybased hubs which would offer integrated support for children, young people and families. These hubs would be linked to local

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schools and would pass on the most severe cases of vulnerability to specialist social work services that focused on safeguarding. The hubs' work was to prevent the escalation of the problems that the schools were unable to cope with alone. The first lengthy extract is a reflection during the DWR meeting by A, who is a head teacher, and B and C, who are two children's services strategic leads with social work backgrounds. It discusses the results of their gardening work, recognising the ‘whys’ in inter-professional collaborations in the last three years. A: I think too we mustn't forget just how far people have travelled since 2007. I've just facilitated a TAC (Team Around the Child) meeting this morning where the TAC process was around the mum who had really acute mental health issues. Her son hadn't been in school for a year, one of her sons was in prison, one's just come out of prison, and the TAC process was really difficult because Mum was very wobbly today, we had to go and pick her up and bring her in, etc. So all of the ingredients that three years ago the guys around the table would have perhaps been apprehensive, wouldn't have known how they could use their skillsets and move that forward, it felt absolutely, you know, stuck, stuck, stuck. And yet within 45 minutes everybody's, you know, there were some school staff there, there was somebody from attendance and engagement, by the end of the meeting a solution has been found and the GP who had come in on her day off etc., etc., was going back to the practice to phone this service and that service. I'd got things to do and you know, three years ago we probably wouldn't have thought everybody could achieve that, but they did.

Researcher — AE What's made the difference? How have you got there?

B: Because I think people have been learning in all sorts of different ways that suits their learning style throughout the TAC process and through coming to locality meetings across the county and learning from each other again in different ways that they can absorb and retain the learning. And I think there's been immense pride in acquiring skills alongside another professional where you're being coached without necessarily knowing you're being coached…And because of all of that work that's going on subconsciously, you know, when you're aware of it, I think there's been a huge amount of learning and change of roles…So I think we've much further on that we're allowing ourselves to say. We've had to bring the barriers down, we've had to say, we can't do this on our own we've got to let other people in, and always around, you know, not just schools but health, everyone, and so be more open.

C: And I think what's happened is, it's about sharing out of responsibilities. Because everybody has seen everybody coming to the table and that gives you confidence, you're not on your own dealing with this, it is part of that TAC team with that family. Everybody has got responsibilities, everybody will go away and do their jobs and bring it back and you're not on your own. And that confidence is hugely important when you are dealing with very complex family situations that you don't feel you're isolated and on your own. These reflections first surfaced the learning that had already occurred (A's contribution) and offered a platform of common knowledge from which further reflections could occur during the DWR session. They then provide evidence of a mutual recognition of the ‘whys’ of different practices and of relational expertise and relational agency in action (the contributions of B and C). The discussion proceeded to how they had initially focused on building common knowledge and how important it was. I think the Joint Area Management groups were set up and initially to bring everybody together and actually start some of that kind of common processes and that common language. And we did move away from it to the Area Trust Boards, which is absolutely right. But actually if I'd a pound for every time people now say, oh we need to bring back the JAM meetings, because actually what we've now got in terms of the Area Trust Boards, they are really quite strategic and there's less opportunities now for operational people to actually come together. And what I thought was absolutely fascinating, those meetings were always so well attended. (Strategic Lead with social work background) These reflections on sharing of what mattered at operational level became articulated as an ambition for the new hubs they were planning. Once you've got seven hub managers in post they will bring their own spin to things, they will bring their own professional backgrounds and it will also be tailored to the needs and what schools and families are telling us in the area that they need… But holding that ring of development and direction of travel is going to be really important in terms of sharing good practice as well. I'm hoping that the schools in the hinterland for the hub will be involved in that shaping and will be a kind of cohesive group of schools where I think we will be able to look at meeting as a group and how things are going with head teachers from that whole area. So we might end up with seven kinds of areas across the county. And I think the hubs may actually provide a kind of locus for that communication and conversation. (Strategic Lead with social work background) Discussion then progressed to the need to appoint hub leaders who were confident in their own expertise, able to articulate it and to recognise what others could offer.

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In these extracts common knowledge was used as a tool in two ways. First as a platform of shared understandings from which the inter-professional DWR discussions could proceed; and second as a collective resource for shaping services to meet the strengths and needs of children, young people and families. This was not an isolated incident. Exchanges of these kinds were evident in all three case studies in the DIW project. However, in one case common knowledge was sometimes used as a tool for resistance to proposed changes (Edwards & Daniels, 2012). This finding takes us to the strategic use of common knowledge examined in the other two studies. 2. Using common knowledge as a strategic tool The two studies for the National College (RL and LL) examined the work of senior leaders and revealed how common knowledge was employed by them as a collective resource for service integration. As I have already indicated, RL studied the knowledge skills and attitudes they exhibited and LL how they built capacity within their organisations. The first study revealed that all senior leaders operated with a narrative of what mattered locally. For some it was a longstanding account based on past successes; while for others it was a forward-looking vision which focused on changing systems to achieve good outcomes for all vulnerable children. The latter saw their role as working on existing practices to create the conditions in which that narrative could be constructed by weaving together and aligning what mattered for the contributing professions. Leading the change processes therefore also involved creating conditions for building workforce capacity to contribute to and take forward the narrative. Fig. 1 is an attempt to represent the interaction that occurred between Directors of Children's Services (DCS) and the practices they were changing in order to take forward their intentions. In brief, in Fig. 1 the contextual landscape represents the historically accumulated practices that are to be worked on and changed. The leadership characteristics represent the expertise that DCS is able to bring to bear on the practices in order to interpret and work on the practices. The purpose indicates the interwoven motives of the different practices that are made visible in the development work and are giving direction to the change process in the continuously reworked organisational narratives. Fig. 1 shows a series of steps in which each step creates the conditions for the work to be done at the next step. It relies heavily on Vygotskian notions of externalisation discussed earlier. At each step the expertise of leaders is evident in the ability to: (i) identify and develop workforce capacity in order to create the conditions for the next phase of building an integrated system; and (ii) continue to develop an institutional narrative that is composed of what matters in each practice which gives coherence to the change processes which are in turn given cohesion by a shared focus on good outcomes for children. The RL study was the starting point for LL, where attention was given to how the leaders built capacity to take forward strategic intentions. Daniels and Edwards (in press) outline the actions successful DCS took as they worked pedagogically in everyday activities with colleagues. Here I focus only on how the institutional narratives that wove together their motives acted as a resource for the development of responsive services centred on good outcomes for children, young people and families. All the extracts are from interviews with the DCS, which were based on the weekly data on actions in activities they returned to us. Each of the ten DCS had created an organisational narrative and reflected on it constantly. I'm a story teller, I use metaphors, trying to get people to see things they haven't seen and I use their language to talk about what we are here for. (DCS) But theirs were also all collective accounts of aligned motives. The DCS recognised that for the narratives to bring cohesion to complex sets of tasks, other voices and views needed to play into them. They needed to be owned and not imposed.

Contextual landscape

Purpose

Leadership Leadership characteristics matters

New contextual landscape

Purpose

Leadership characteristics

New contextual landscape

Purpose

Leadership characteristics

Overarching purpose reached through iterative change process Fig. 1. Creating the conditions for taking forward the narrative.

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My natural inclination is to think the problem through and know the answer. But I fight it and go out to people who might help with solving it…I help them get the tools and offer to help myself. (DCS)

I try to understand where people are coming from — their agenda and motives and what the end game solution might be… and you need to negotiate measures of success. (DCS)

For sustainable change you need to be part of the re-setting and re-set yourself. Re-setting is not a quick fix. You need to tell a grand vision story and enable people to see their pathways. It is not as linear as you would like. (DCS)

Policy has changed — a lot of certainty has been pulled away from them. Motives are constantly under review. (DCS) Each narrative was therefore built as the DCS interacted with colleagues in their everyday activities as well as in meetings convened to thrash out problems. The narratives gave stability while allowing for discussions of difference. The DCS could do this because of two key features in the narratives: they focused on outcomes for children as the glue that held together the different purposes of the contributing practices; and they provided a framework against which existing practices could be assessed and new suggestions examined. These high performing DCS recognised that allowing differences in motives to surface was crucial if complex problems were to be understood and tackled i.e. the objects of activity expanded. The narratives then became a resource that mediated different interpretations of the problems being worked on in often quite robust discussions. These are very intense meetings. We are focused. Meetings are robust, challenging, fun and business-like. (DCS)

It's about knowing where we are going and we can get there. I can't cope with pessimism. If that's where they are I need to work with them. I check whether they are clear about the vision and signed up to it. It is important that we have honest conversations. (DCS) The emphasis given by the DCS to building and refreshing these value-laden narratives as a resource that mediated collaboration across practices pointed to how common knowledge can operate as a tool for the gardening aspects of service integration. The DCS clearly encouraged exploratory talk where ideas were made visible and open to public scrutiny (Mercer, 1996); but attention to professional motives made these efforts more than exercises in rational thinking. The DCS also harnessed the emotional aspects of the expertise available to them. As one explained, she endeavoured to understand the ‘grit in the shoe’ of the people she worked with: what kept them going in this challenging work. The DCS were not creating horizontal structures, but were nurturing capacity for working relationally with regular reference to shared and frequently contestable accounts of what mattered.

Concluding discussion The ideas discussed here reflect a Vygotskian endeavour of staying close to practice in order to test and fine-tune conceptual tools that can be used to understand and work on the world. The ideas of relational expertise, relational agency and, in particular, common knowledge are offered tentatively as tools to be worked on and with by others as they take them into different fields to both analyse and develop collaborations between practices. The recognition of common knowledge as a resource that mediates both the interpretations and responses to complex problems, such as the developmental trajectories of vulnerable children, arose through iterations between the conceptual tools of cultural historical theory and the field of inter-professional practice. When introducing the concept of relational agency (Edwards, 2005; Edwards, 2009a, 2009b) I explained that different professional motives led to an expansion of, for example, a child's trajectory as an object of activity so that greater complexity could be revealed and a broader set of responses put in place. However, I subsequently puzzled about what mediated these interpretations and responses. Evidence from the LIW study (Edwards et al., 2009) demonstrated that successful relational collaboration involved being able to ‘press the right buttons’ as one educational psychologist put it, when talking across practices. The later studies discussed here began to reveal even more clearly that inter-professional collaborations worked best when practitioners could understand what was important for others when they encountered a problem with a child. Common knowledge, defined here as comprising the different ‘whys’ or purposes of potentially collaborating practices, could be seen to be being built and used in the fluid and responsive practices now demanded by workers in children's services. This programme of work owes a great deal to Engeström's (2008) ground-breaking studies of how activity systems operate and may collaborate on potentially shared objects of activities. His conceptualisation of activity systems was the starting point for most of the studies listed at the start of this article. However, it soon became clear that collaborations on potentially shared

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objects of activity in the newly configuring children's services were between people who were often working together despite the systems in which their practices were located (Edwards et al., 2009). What happened when these people got together at the sites of intersecting practices became the setting for the activities which were of analytic importance (Edwards, 2010). These sites were not activity systems, but places where the activities were discussions of children or other problems of practice. Meanings were negotiated in these discussions and conversations were given coherence by a shared long-term, if sometimes vague, focus on good outcomes for children. This focus meant that it was necessary to work analytically at the level of activities in these sites in order to reveal what happened when actors as individuals came to understand what others were bringing to interpretations of potentially shared objects of activity. Here Hedegaard's (2012) work on motives in practices was extremely helpful. Her attention to the activity setting in a practice and her focus on actions-in activities-in settings highlighted the links that Leont'ev made between actions and activities (Leont'ev, 1981). They also encouraged analyses which placed individual actions and interactions in activities in relation to motives in institutional practices, which were in turn connected to wider societal policies and priorities. The cultural–historical challenge is always to keep these different aspects, from the societal to the individual in analytic interplay and Hedegaard's framing helped to trace how policy intentions were made visible in actions in everyday activities. Working with the core idea of practices, rather than systems, allowed a focus on the interacting individuals and the nature of the sites where practices intersected. All of the DCS in the LL study created sites where practices could intersect and understandings could be made visible and discussed. Some limited themselves to working only at the most senior level, expecting these activities to be mirrored down the organisation by colleagues. Others led these activities throughout the organisation and were at pains to include parents and carers in discussions. Creating the conditions for enhancing practice through mutual sharing of what matters was also central to the leaders' work in the RL study. In both studies, we found that these sites operated as fora where what matters could be made visible and trust negotiated. These conversations could then lead to later interactions which were quite different from the person to person negotiations between the French architect and town planner. There, each fought with passion for what mattered in his own practice. The policy-driven changes to children's services, which were underway during all three studies discussed here, meant that practitioners had no choice but to interact across professional boundaries and make inter-professional collaborations work effectively for children, young people and families. The extracts from the DIW study shows how common knowledge was constructed and deployed to that end. The RL project took the focus to how organisational narratives were built by senior leaders. The leaders made public what mattered in practices, as the practices were developed, in order to take forward the strategic intentions of the reconfiguring services. The LL study allowed greater attention to the processes of narrative building, revealing just how important weaving together professional motives, to build a public narrative as a resource for mediating differences, was to all of the DCS. The three gardening tools, relational expertise, relational agency and common knowledge operate at the analytic level between the collective and the individual. They are intended to give some purchase on the processes of leading and shaping the collaboration and organisational development traced in the three studies. Professionals such as education welfare officers, psychologists, social workers and teachers are all experts in their own fields. Their challenge, when collaborating on a mobile object of activity such as a child's trajectory, is to not simply work in the here and now to solve a presenting problem, but to work to integrate what they know with what others know and need to do. Common knowledge woven into future-oriented, outcomebased narratives appears to mediate interactions and give some stability to the fluid and responsive practices now demanded of these professionals. The leaders whose discussions have been relayed recognised this and built it as a strategic resource. But where next? The analyses have focused on interacting professionals and elsewhere I have discussed how the relational turn in expertise enhances rather than diminishes professional aspects of practice (Edwards, 2010; Edwards, 2011). The argument is that it demands an additional relational expertise alongside specialist expertise as a social worker or teacher. An obvious next step is to take more seriously the public value arguments of Benington and Moore (2010) and focus on how these gardening tools inform professional interactions with children, young people and their families. References Benington, J. (2010). From private choice to public value? In J. Benington, & M. Moore (Eds.), Public value: Theory and practice (pp. 31–51). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Benington, J., & Moore, M. (Eds.). (2010). Public value: Theory and practice. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Callon, M., Lascoumes, P., & Barthe, Y. (2011). Acting in an uncertain world: An essay on technical democracy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Canwell, A., Hannan, S., Longfils, H., & Edwards, A. (2011). Resourceful leadership: How directors of children's services improve outcomes for children. Nottingham: National College for Leadership of Schools and Children's Services. Carlile, P. (2004). Transferring, translating and transforming: An integrative framework for managing knowledge across boundaries. Organization Science, 15(5), 555–568. Christensen, T., & Laegreid, P. (2007, November/December). The whole of government approach to public service reform. Public Administration Review (pp. 1059–1066). Collins, H. (2004). Interactional expertise as a third kind of knowledge. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 3, 125–143. Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace. Daniels, H., & Edwards, A. in press. Leading for learning: how the intelligent leader builds capacity. 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