M Noordegraaf
Biographic Data
| ID | 12226 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Noordegraaf |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Noordegraaf |
| SIGNATURE | NOORDEGRAAF M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3445-8568 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 347 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 26 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Grounded professionalism
Research on professionalism is dominated by generic models from the Global North. Prevailing frameworks assume well-established institutions, clear professional boundaries and resource-rich service settings. Yet, in postcolonial small islands in the Global South, such premises are difficult to sustain. Police officers, social workers and teachers operate in tightly interwoven communities, with limited workforces and a lack of (financial) means, w…
‘You are shaken awake!’ a qualitative study on using virtual reality to understand patients’ experiences
PURPOSE OF THE ARTICLE: Medical professionals may get to appreciate the experience of patients, without being patients themselves. This study explored whether VR technology can be useful for teaching medical professionals about patient experiences. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A VR movie was made, showing a fictitious but realistic patient experience. Nineteen medical professionals, selected by a non-probability sampling method, saw this movie. Focus g…
Professional work in turbulent times
Public professionals such as medical doctors, teachers, and police officers are key actors in delivering public health, education, and security. However, the service settings in which professionals operate and the cases they face are affected by societal turbulence. The sudden spread of pandemics, geopolitical upheaval, or new digital technologies affect the societal context, organizational resources, and clients’ demands. In this paper, we contr…
Leadership practices in collaborative innovation
School principals and teachers are expected to continuously innovate their practices in changing school environments. These innovation processes can be shared more widely through collaboration between principals and teachers, i.e. collaborative innovation. In order to gain more insight into how school principals enact their leadership practices in leading collaborative innovation, we interviewed 22 school principals of primary, secondary and voca…
Collaborative spirit
While the effects of distributed leadership are widely studied, how to understand this practice in sociocultural contexts is relatively unknown. Mostly only one contextual level – such as the school level – is studied. We included individual, team, and school levels, and investigated differences in distributed leadership among 14 collaborative innovation-oriented teacher teams (130–168 teachers and their principals). Using a mixed-method design, …
Why Medical Residents Do (and Don’t) Speak Up About Organizational Barriers and Opportunities to Improve the Quality of Care
PURPOSE: Medical residents are valuable sources of information about the quality of frontline service delivery, but if they do not speak up, their ideas, opinions, and suggestions for improving their work practices cannot be considered. However, speaking up can be difficult for residents. Therefore, the authors have explored both what helps residents speak up about organizational barriers and opportunities to improve the quality of their work and…
Staging Science
In the COVID‐19 crisis, society pins its hopes on science to play an authoritative role in reducing uncertainty and ambiguity. But is science up to the task? This is far from self‐evident. The demands on science in times of crisis run counter to the values of good, normal science. Crisis science needs to be fast, univocal, personalized, and direct, while normal science is slow, contentious, collective, and sensitive to complexity. Science can onl…
Designing to Debias
Public managers’ decisions are affected by cognitive biases. For instance , employees’ previous year's performance ratings influence new ratings irrespective of actual performance. Nevertheless , experimental knowledge of public managers’ cognitive biases is limited, and debiasing techniques have rarely been studied. Using a survey experiment on 1 , 221 public managers and employees in the United Kingdom, this research (1) replicates two experime…
Nudging healthcare professionals towards evidence-based medicine
Translating medical evidence into practice is difficult. Key challenges in applying evidence-based medicine are information overload and that evidence needs to be used in context by healthcare professionals. Nudging (i.e. softly steering) healthcare professionals towards utilizing evidence-based medicine may be a feasible possibility. This systematic scoping review is the first overview of nudging healthcare professionals in relation to evidence-…
Weaknesses of wickedness
It is attractive to frame societal challenges such as climate change, terrorism and migration as ‘wicked issues’. Wickedness theory in its various guises has become popular as it connects the uncertain and political nature of issues with hopeful strategies for strengthening networks, trust and learning. In this paper we take a critical approach towards wickedness, advancing three criticisms: (1) the daily experiences of people and their practices…
Fighting the Enemy Within? Challenging Minor Principles of Professionalism in Care and Welfare
Wilensky’s seminal article on professionals mentions three identifying characteristics besides the familiar specialized knowledge, autonomy and professional ideology. These are the referral principle, which states that professionals should refer clients to a colleague with a different specialty if necessary, the principle of sloughing off, which dictates that professionals allocate less rewarding parts of their job to lesser paid assistants, and …
How to evaluate the governance of transboundary problems? Assessing a national counterterrorism strategy
Wicked problems present major challenges for evaluation as they cross the boundaries between countries, policy domains, organizations, and scientific disciplines. They force evaluators to study large networks in order to trace extended chains of cause and effect. However, beyond this category of ‘regular’ wicked problems that cross boundaries, there is another class of even more complex problems that truly transcend boundaries. Problems such as t…
Speaking Up and Activism Among Frontline Employees
Demands that exceed time and resources place pressure on public professionals, resulting in coping behavior. This study aims to provide insight in the prevalence and consequences of taking a more active strategy, professional coping. Next to traditional forms of coping studied in public administration, studying active coping can result in more insight in when and with what consequences frontline employees speak up and resist pressures. We explore…
Reconfiguring Professional Work
Many public services are produced by professional workers who deal with cases and clients on the basis of professional knowledge and skills. As groups of workers, they acquired autonomies to structure professional knowledge and skills and to regulate case treatment. During the previous years, professional work has changed. Most often, the “new public management” is seen as the main driver: Service provision is said to be managerialized to make se…
Hybrid professionalism and beyond
It is tempting to stick to traditional, ‘pure’ images of professionalism—as the protected treatment of complex cases—and to resist ‘alien’ intrusions, especially managerial ‘encroachments’. However, it has become rather normal to link professionalism to well-managed organizational surroundings and to focus on emerging hybrid professional practices in which professional work is (re)organized in one way or the other. Contradictory professional and …
Responses to Managerialism
Management pressures in fields like education force managers to control professionals. This generates friction. Professionals will not easily comply with control objectives; they feel responsible for clients and quality. Researchers have studied how professionals are affected and how they resist managerial interference. How managers themselves are affected by managerialism, whether they adopt control logics and are ‘driven away’ from work floors,…
Risky Business
As professionals belong to occupational systems but also increasingly work inside organizations, new linkages between occupational and organizational domains are required, but they are difficult to develop. Occupational principles and professional standards are usually considered to be at odds with managerial and organizational control principles. This generates academic and practical dualisms. Either a return to professionalism is advocated in o…
Remaking professionals? How associations and professional education connect professionalism and organizations
This article highlights connections between professional and organizational logics that might arise outside organizations, especially during professional education. Traditionally, many professionals were educated and prepared for rendering services and securing quality, irrespective of organizational surroundings. Contemporary service surroundings force professional associations to 'remake' rank and file professionals, so that professional behavi…
Professional Capital Contested
Although Bourdieu paid scant attention to (and in fact discredited) the notion of professionalism, his social theory is well-equipped to understand the evolution of professional work. Professionalism can be conceived as a set of symbolic resources that (re)produce an occupational order, favoring expertise and craftsmanship. In neo-liberal economies this order is contested and professional powers are distrusted; professional work is seen as closed…
Professionalism as Symbolic Capital
Pierre Bourdieu has given a brief but fierce critique of the concept of 'profession' that calls for a more reflexive analysis of the professions and in fact suggests not using the concept at all. In this contribution, we explicate the gist of that critique and argue it is possible to analyze it in a Bourdieusian fashion. We regard professionalism as a form of symbolic capital, the substance of which is constantly at stake in power-driven contexts…
Culture in Action
This article discusses the relation between administrative culture and the capacity to act. It analyses how the Dutch city of Rotterdam radically altered its safety and ‘livability’ approaches in the face of new challenges, and how the city used its cultural make-up and traditions in doing so. This takes its importance from that fact that local governments are almost continuously confronted with the need to reform policies and methods in the face…
Professional Power Play
Because of the managerialization of health care and the rise of health care managers, professionals and managers increasingly ‘clash’. To reduce clashes, managerial and professional domains have not only been (re)connected; they have also been restructured. Managers, in particular, have started to make sense of their own ‘professionalism’. Health care managers are professionalizing in order to cope with reform consequences. They have established …
From “Pure” to “Hybrid” Professionalism
Public sectors struggle with professionalism. Classic professions are weakened, welfare state occupations professionalize, and public managers try to become professionals. This raises questions. What is professionalism? What is professional control in ambiguous occupational domains? What happens when different types of occupational control get mixed up? The first question is answered by portraying classic professionalism as “controlled content.” …
Fragmented but Forceful
This article is an attempt by three (relatively) young scholars to make sense of the broad field of public administration (PA), in The Netherlands, with particular emphasis on Dutch administrative sciences. The one essential fact about the Dutch administrative sciences is that they lack a real essence, both in institutional and in paradigmatic terms. They are fragmented – yet forceful. Nevertheless, we will argue, they must recast their position …
Public Managers Amidst Ambiguity
Contemporary public management is characterized by a strong tendency to introduce performance measurement in order to reduce complexity. Public managers face two challenges when performing their work: uncertainty and ambiguity. Ambiguity is understood as the absence of or contradictory interpretations about what needs to, can and should be done, when and where. In this article we argue that the intensity and nature of ambiguity vary, depending on…
From “Pure” to “Hybrid” Professionalism
Public sectors struggle with professionalism. Classic professions are weakened, welfare state occupations professionalize, and public managers try to become professionals. This raises questions. What is professionalism? What is professional control in ambiguous occupational domains? What happens when different types of occupational control get mixed up? The first question is answered by portraying classic professionalism as “controlled content.” …
Professionalism as Symbolic Capital
Pierre Bourdieu has given a brief but fierce critique of the concept of 'profession' that calls for a more reflexive analysis of the professions and in fact suggests not using the concept at all. In this contribution, we explicate the gist of that critique and argue it is possible to analyze it in a Bourdieusian fashion. We regard professionalism as a form of symbolic capital, the substance of which is constantly at stake in power-driven contexts…
Management by Measurement? Public Management Practices Amidst Ambiguity
In the public sphere, a management by measurement (MBM) movement can be traced. Practitioners attempt to strengthen the transparency and effectiveness of administrative systems by introducing rational measurement cycles. When issues are managed, ambitions must be stated, options must be assessed, optimal options must be chosen and performance must be monitored and evaluated. This cycle rests upon assumptions that are often untenable. When issues …
Staging Science
In the COVID‐19 crisis, society pins its hopes on science to play an authoritative role in reducing uncertainty and ambiguity. But is science up to the task? This is far from self‐evident. The demands on science in times of crisis run counter to the values of good, normal science. Crisis science needs to be fast, univocal, personalized, and direct, while normal science is slow, contentious, collective, and sensitive to complexity. Science can onl…
Reconfiguring Professional Work
Many public services are produced by professional workers who deal with cases and clients on the basis of professional knowledge and skills. As groups of workers, they acquired autonomies to structure professional knowledge and skills and to regulate case treatment. During the previous years, professional work has changed. Most often, the “new public management” is seen as the main driver: Service provision is said to be managerialized to make se…
Designing to Debias
Public managers’ decisions are affected by cognitive biases. For instance , employees’ previous year's performance ratings influence new ratings irrespective of actual performance. Nevertheless , experimental knowledge of public managers’ cognitive biases is limited, and debiasing techniques have rarely been studied. Using a survey experiment on 1 , 221 public managers and employees in the United Kingdom, this research (1) replicates two experime…
Professional Capital Contested
Although Bourdieu paid scant attention to (and in fact discredited) the notion of professionalism, his social theory is well-equipped to understand the evolution of professional work. Professionalism can be conceived as a set of symbolic resources that (re)produce an occupational order, favoring expertise and craftsmanship. In neo-liberal economies this order is contested and professional powers are distrusted; professional work is seen as closed…
Remaking professionals? How associations and professional education connect professionalism and organizations
This article highlights connections between professional and organizational logics that might arise outside organizations, especially during professional education. Traditionally, many professionals were educated and prepared for rendering services and securing quality, irrespective of organizational surroundings. Contemporary service surroundings force professional associations to 'remake' rank and file professionals, so that professional behavi…
Professional Power Play
Because of the managerialization of health care and the rise of health care managers, professionals and managers increasingly ‘clash’. To reduce clashes, managerial and professional domains have not only been (re)connected; they have also been restructured. Managers, in particular, have started to make sense of their own ‘professionalism’. Health care managers are professionalizing in order to cope with reform consequences. They have established …
Weaknesses of wickedness
It is attractive to frame societal challenges such as climate change, terrorism and migration as ‘wicked issues’. Wickedness theory in its various guises has become popular as it connects the uncertain and political nature of issues with hopeful strategies for strengthening networks, trust and learning. In this paper we take a critical approach towards wickedness, advancing three criticisms: (1) the daily experiences of people and their practices…
How to evaluate the governance of transboundary problems? Assessing a national counterterrorism strategy
Wicked problems present major challenges for evaluation as they cross the boundaries between countries, policy domains, organizations, and scientific disciplines. They force evaluators to study large networks in order to trace extended chains of cause and effect. However, beyond this category of ‘regular’ wicked problems that cross boundaries, there is another class of even more complex problems that truly transcend boundaries. Problems such as t…
Speaking Up and Activism Among Frontline Employees
Demands that exceed time and resources place pressure on public professionals, resulting in coping behavior. This study aims to provide insight in the prevalence and consequences of taking a more active strategy, professional coping. Next to traditional forms of coping studied in public administration, studying active coping can result in more insight in when and with what consequences frontline employees speak up and resist pressures. We explore…
Public Managers Amidst Ambiguity
Contemporary public management is characterized by a strong tendency to introduce performance measurement in order to reduce complexity. Public managers face two challenges when performing their work: uncertainty and ambiguity. Ambiguity is understood as the absence of or contradictory interpretations about what needs to, can and should be done, when and where. In this article we argue that the intensity and nature of ambiguity vary, depending on…
Culture in Action
This article discusses the relation between administrative culture and the capacity to act. It analyses how the Dutch city of Rotterdam radically altered its safety and ‘livability’ approaches in the face of new challenges, and how the city used its cultural make-up and traditions in doing so. This takes its importance from that fact that local governments are almost continuously confronted with the need to reform policies and methods in the face…
Responses to Managerialism
Management pressures in fields like education force managers to control professionals. This generates friction. Professionals will not easily comply with control objectives; they feel responsible for clients and quality. Researchers have studied how professionals are affected and how they resist managerial interference. How managers themselves are affected by managerialism, whether they adopt control logics and are ‘driven away’ from work floors,…
Fragmented but Forceful
This article is an attempt by three (relatively) young scholars to make sense of the broad field of public administration (PA), in The Netherlands, with particular emphasis on Dutch administrative sciences. The one essential fact about the Dutch administrative sciences is that they lack a real essence, both in institutional and in paradigmatic terms. They are fragmented – yet forceful. Nevertheless, we will argue, they must recast their position …
Public Managers Amidst Ambiguity
Contemporary public management is characterized by a strong tendency to introduce performance measurement in order to reduce complexity. Public managers face two challenges when performing their work: uncertainty and ambiguity. Ambiguity is understood as the absence of or contradictory interpretations about what needs to, can and should be done, when and where. In this article we argue that the intensity and nature of ambiguity vary, depending on…
Management by Measurement? Public Management Practices Amidst Ambiguity
In the public sphere, a management by measurement (MBM) movement can be traced. Practitioners attempt to strengthen the transparency and effectiveness of administrative systems by introducing rational measurement cycles. When issues are managed, ambitions must be stated, options must be assessed, optimal options must be chosen and performance must be monitored and evaluated. This cycle rests upon assumptions that are often untenable. When issues …
Fragmented but Forceful
This article is an attempt by three (relatively) young scholars to make sense of the broad field of public administration (PA), in The Netherlands, with particular emphasis on Dutch administrative sciences. The one essential fact about the Dutch administrative sciences is that they lack a real essence, both in institutional and in paradigmatic terms. They are fragmented – yet forceful. Nevertheless, we will argue, they must recast their position …
From “Pure” to “Hybrid” Professionalism
Public sectors struggle with professionalism. Classic professions are weakened, welfare state occupations professionalize, and public managers try to become professionals. This raises questions. What is professionalism? What is professional control in ambiguous occupational domains? What happens when different types of occupational control get mixed up? The first question is answered by portraying classic professionalism as “controlled content.” …
Professional Power Play
Because of the managerialization of health care and the rise of health care managers, professionals and managers increasingly ‘clash’. To reduce clashes, managerial and professional domains have not only been (re)connected; they have also been restructured. Managers, in particular, have started to make sense of their own ‘professionalism’. Health care managers are professionalizing in order to cope with reform consequences. They have established …
Culture in Action
This article discusses the relation between administrative culture and the capacity to act. It analyses how the Dutch city of Rotterdam radically altered its safety and ‘livability’ approaches in the face of new challenges, and how the city used its cultural make-up and traditions in doing so. This takes its importance from that fact that local governments are almost continuously confronted with the need to reform policies and methods in the face…
Risky Business
As professionals belong to occupational systems but also increasingly work inside organizations, new linkages between occupational and organizational domains are required, but they are difficult to develop. Occupational principles and professional standards are usually considered to be at odds with managerial and organizational control principles. This generates academic and practical dualisms. Either a return to professionalism is advocated in o…
Remaking professionals? How associations and professional education connect professionalism and organizations
This article highlights connections between professional and organizational logics that might arise outside organizations, especially during professional education. Traditionally, many professionals were educated and prepared for rendering services and securing quality, irrespective of organizational surroundings. Contemporary service surroundings force professional associations to 'remake' rank and file professionals, so that professional behavi…
Professional Capital Contested
Although Bourdieu paid scant attention to (and in fact discredited) the notion of professionalism, his social theory is well-equipped to understand the evolution of professional work. Professionalism can be conceived as a set of symbolic resources that (re)produce an occupational order, favoring expertise and craftsmanship. In neo-liberal economies this order is contested and professional powers are distrusted; professional work is seen as closed…
Professionalism as Symbolic Capital
Pierre Bourdieu has given a brief but fierce critique of the concept of 'profession' that calls for a more reflexive analysis of the professions and in fact suggests not using the concept at all. In this contribution, we explicate the gist of that critique and argue it is possible to analyze it in a Bourdieusian fashion. We regard professionalism as a form of symbolic capital, the substance of which is constantly at stake in power-driven contexts…
Responses to Managerialism
Management pressures in fields like education force managers to control professionals. This generates friction. Professionals will not easily comply with control objectives; they feel responsible for clients and quality. Researchers have studied how professionals are affected and how they resist managerial interference. How managers themselves are affected by managerialism, whether they adopt control logics and are ‘driven away’ from work floors,…
Hybrid professionalism and beyond
It is tempting to stick to traditional, ‘pure’ images of professionalism—as the protected treatment of complex cases—and to resist ‘alien’ intrusions, especially managerial ‘encroachments’. However, it has become rather normal to link professionalism to well-managed organizational surroundings and to focus on emerging hybrid professional practices in which professional work is (re)organized in one way or the other. Contradictory professional and …
Speaking Up and Activism Among Frontline Employees
Demands that exceed time and resources place pressure on public professionals, resulting in coping behavior. This study aims to provide insight in the prevalence and consequences of taking a more active strategy, professional coping. Next to traditional forms of coping studied in public administration, studying active coping can result in more insight in when and with what consequences frontline employees speak up and resist pressures. We explore…
Reconfiguring Professional Work
Many public services are produced by professional workers who deal with cases and clients on the basis of professional knowledge and skills. As groups of workers, they acquired autonomies to structure professional knowledge and skills and to regulate case treatment. During the previous years, professional work has changed. Most often, the “new public management” is seen as the main driver: Service provision is said to be managerialized to make se…
How to evaluate the governance of transboundary problems? Assessing a national counterterrorism strategy
Wicked problems present major challenges for evaluation as they cross the boundaries between countries, policy domains, organizations, and scientific disciplines. They force evaluators to study large networks in order to trace extended chains of cause and effect. However, beyond this category of ‘regular’ wicked problems that cross boundaries, there is another class of even more complex problems that truly transcend boundaries. Problems such as t…
Fighting the Enemy Within? Challenging Minor Principles of Professionalism in Care and Welfare
Wilensky’s seminal article on professionals mentions three identifying characteristics besides the familiar specialized knowledge, autonomy and professional ideology. These are the referral principle, which states that professionals should refer clients to a colleague with a different specialty if necessary, the principle of sloughing off, which dictates that professionals allocate less rewarding parts of their job to lesser paid assistants, and …
Nudging healthcare professionals towards evidence-based medicine
Translating medical evidence into practice is difficult. Key challenges in applying evidence-based medicine are information overload and that evidence needs to be used in context by healthcare professionals. Nudging (i.e. softly steering) healthcare professionals towards utilizing evidence-based medicine may be a feasible possibility. This systematic scoping review is the first overview of nudging healthcare professionals in relation to evidence-…
Weaknesses of wickedness
It is attractive to frame societal challenges such as climate change, terrorism and migration as ‘wicked issues’. Wickedness theory in its various guises has become popular as it connects the uncertain and political nature of issues with hopeful strategies for strengthening networks, trust and learning. In this paper we take a critical approach towards wickedness, advancing three criticisms: (1) the daily experiences of people and their practices…
Why Medical Residents Do (and Don’t) Speak Up About Organizational Barriers and Opportunities to Improve the Quality of Care
PURPOSE: Medical residents are valuable sources of information about the quality of frontline service delivery, but if they do not speak up, their ideas, opinions, and suggestions for improving their work practices cannot be considered. However, speaking up can be difficult for residents. Therefore, the authors have explored both what helps residents speak up about organizational barriers and opportunities to improve the quality of their work and…
Staging Science
In the COVID‐19 crisis, society pins its hopes on science to play an authoritative role in reducing uncertainty and ambiguity. But is science up to the task? This is far from self‐evident. The demands on science in times of crisis run counter to the values of good, normal science. Crisis science needs to be fast, univocal, personalized, and direct, while normal science is slow, contentious, collective, and sensitive to complexity. Science can onl…
Designing to Debias
Public managers’ decisions are affected by cognitive biases. For instance , employees’ previous year's performance ratings influence new ratings irrespective of actual performance. Nevertheless , experimental knowledge of public managers’ cognitive biases is limited, and debiasing techniques have rarely been studied. Using a survey experiment on 1 , 221 public managers and employees in the United Kingdom, this research (1) replicates two experime…
Leadership practices in collaborative innovation
School principals and teachers are expected to continuously innovate their practices in changing school environments. These innovation processes can be shared more widely through collaboration between principals and teachers, i.e. collaborative innovation. In order to gain more insight into how school principals enact their leadership practices in leading collaborative innovation, we interviewed 22 school principals of primary, secondary and voca…
Collaborative spirit
While the effects of distributed leadership are widely studied, how to understand this practice in sociocultural contexts is relatively unknown. Mostly only one contextual level – such as the school level – is studied. We included individual, team, and school levels, and investigated differences in distributed leadership among 14 collaborative innovation-oriented teacher teams (130–168 teachers and their principals). Using a mixed-method design, …
Grounded professionalism
Research on professionalism is dominated by generic models from the Global North. Prevailing frameworks assume well-established institutions, clear professional boundaries and resource-rich service settings. Yet, in postcolonial small islands in the Global South, such premises are difficult to sustain. Police officers, social workers and teachers operate in tightly interwoven communities, with limited workforces and a lack of (financial) means, w…
‘You are shaken awake!’ a qualitative study on using virtual reality to understand patients’ experiences
PURPOSE OF THE ARTICLE: Medical professionals may get to appreciate the experience of patients, without being patients themselves. This study explored whether VR technology can be useful for teaching medical professionals about patient experiences. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A VR movie was made, showing a fictitious but realistic patient experience. Nineteen medical professionals, selected by a non-probability sampling method, saw this movie. Focus g…
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Public relations (15 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (11 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Business (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Economics (7 works)