Professionals as the authors of their work: Service advisors as navigators of changing services
Keywords:
transitional work, service advising, social and healthcare services, professional, proactivityAbstract
Social and healthcare services are in major transition, in which service integration and digitalization may produce more meaningful, better and efficient services for the citizens. Scientific discussion on technological disruption and its influence on jobs has been dominated by macro-level analyses on changes in occupations and the thread of significant loss of jobs because of the automation. This research opens up a task-level analysis on changing work. The article analyses new forms of an emerging profession, called service advisor (n=5), which is an example how professionals become proactive authors of their work. Three types of authorship were found from the qualitative data: 1) the proactive caretaker and co-creator, 2) the sensitive service integrator and interlocutor, and 3) the digital guide and snag solver. The roles were influenced by their relationships with customers and other professionals. Providing flexibility and autonomy to the employees to modify their roles enabled their organizational authorship to emerge. In the period of technological disruption the organization needs professionals who become active agents, who create new tasks for themselves.
