Strengthening Professional Agency Through Professional Dialogue: Results From a Bottom-Up Action Research Approach From the Netherlands

In order to deliver good work, professionals need agency – the ability to act and decide on the course of one’s actions. The agency of professionals in the public sector is however increasingly under pressure. Research suggests that these limitations on the agency of public professionals in turn limit their ability to create and sustain positive outcomes for the people and populations they serve.

In this chapter, we discuss findings resulting from a longitudinal bottom-up action research approach in the Dutch education sector. The approach is aimed at strengthening the agency of public professionals, using professional dialogue as a central concept. We present and discuss both the methodology used and the results of that methodology in strengthening the agency of public professionals in 11 teams in 3 educational institutions.

The results suggest that there are clear benefits of a tailor-made support for teams of professionals, such as employed in the action research. In varying degrees and dependent on context, this started or accelerated reflection on and improvement in setting goals, cooperation in the team and quality of work, thus at least partly increasing the agency of public professionals in the teams. In varying degrees, the lack of sufficient team and organizational conditions were found to often hinder the development of agency of public professionals.