Rethinking Professional Responsibility: Matters of Account

Existing literature on professional responsibility is characterised by much moral prescription, opinion, and concern for methods to educate professionals to perform more responsibly. Yet growing research points to the pluralism of professionals’ obligations, and the conflicts in responsibility that they must negotiate. This chapter critically examines the material enactments of these conflicts and compromises – the entanglements of the social and personal with bodies, tools, technologies and spaces. What ‘responsibilities’ are enacted in these sociomaterial assemblages? How do professionals negotiate the ambivalences of these complex becomings to find lines of ‘responsible’ action? What matters most to professionals in these ‘mattered’ enactments of responsibility