TY - JOUR

T1 - Professional responsibility in the borderlands

T2 - Facing irreconcilable accountability regimes in veterinary work

AU - Pas, Berber

AU - Introna, Lucas D. D

AU - Wolters, Rinske

AU - Vosselman, Ed

PY - 2023/12/31

Y1 - 2023/12/31

N2 - (Dutch) veterinarians have increasingly been confronted with conflicting accountability regimes, related to data-driven, networked accountability systems, to decrease the use of antibiotics in veterinary practices. Based on our longitudinal ethnography (2012–2020), we propose a conceptual model that illustrates how professionals intra-actively become positioned in different accountability regimes, yet which is continually diffracted by the recalling of their responsibilities to proximal and distant others. By taking an agential realist approach, we contribute to recent critical perspectives on accountability by showing how veterinary professionals become positioned as specific accountable subjects and yet how such positioning simultaneously produces the ‘borderlands’ – a space of indeterminacy in which the accounting practices of the professional are continuously weighed in light of incommensurable responsibilities. Based on our results, we show how conflicting accountability regimes are—as often argued—not to be ‘fixed’ through commensuration, nor are they dysfunctional. Rather, they create the very condition of indeterminacy, opening up the possibility for professional responsibility. We offer suggestions for how to further investigate this appreciation of the borderlands, for example, by focusing on how the account holder can draw from other responsibilities to counter a dominant accountability regime, and how governing authorities can become positioned as responsible for keeping professionals in the borderlands.

AB - (Dutch) veterinarians have increasingly been confronted with conflicting accountability regimes, related to data-driven, networked accountability systems, to decrease the use of antibiotics in veterinary practices. Based on our longitudinal ethnography (2012–2020), we propose a conceptual model that illustrates how professionals intra-actively become positioned in different accountability regimes, yet which is continually diffracted by the recalling of their responsibilities to proximal and distant others. By taking an agential realist approach, we contribute to recent critical perspectives on accountability by showing how veterinary professionals become positioned as specific accountable subjects and yet how such positioning simultaneously produces the ‘borderlands’ – a space of indeterminacy in which the accounting practices of the professional are continuously weighed in light of incommensurable responsibilities. Based on our results, we show how conflicting accountability regimes are—as often argued—not to be ‘fixed’ through commensuration, nor are they dysfunctional. Rather, they create the very condition of indeterminacy, opening up the possibility for professional responsibility. We offer suggestions for how to further investigate this appreciation of the borderlands, for example, by focusing on how the account holder can draw from other responsibilities to counter a dominant accountability regime, and how governing authorities can become positioned as responsible for keeping professionals in the borderlands.

KW - accountability regimes

KW - professional accountability

KW - responsibility

KW - agential realism/relational ontology

KW - veterinarians

U2 - 10.1177/00187267221120161

DO - 10.1177/00187267221120161

M3 - Journal article

VL - 76

SP - 1904

EP - 1939

JO - Human Relations

JF - Human Relations

SN - 0018-7267

IS - 12

ER -