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Three core ideas are at the heart of this book: relational expertise, the capacity to interpret problems with others; common knowledge, which consists of knowing what matters for professionals in other practices; and relational agency, which involves using that common knowledge to take action with others. These ideas are based in cultural-historical approaches to learning and change, and give coherence to the arguments presented. This is not a recipe book; the ideas are offered as resources for reflecting on and developing professional and research practices, and the conditions in which they occur

Professionals deal with complex problems which require working with the expertise of others, but being able to collaborate resourcefully with others is an additional form of expertise. This book draws on a series of research studies to explain what is involved in the new concept of working relationally across practices. It demonstrates how spending time building common knowledge between different professions aids collaboration. The core concept is relational agency, which can arise between practitioners who work together on a complex task: whether reconfiguring the trajectory of a vulnerable child or developing a piece of computer software. Common knowledge, which captures the motives and values of each profession, is essential for the exercise of relational agency and contributing to and working with the common knowledge of what matters for each profession is a new form of relational expertise. The book is based on a wide body of field research including the author's own. It tackles how to research expert practices using Vygotskian perspectives, and demonstrates how Cultural Historical and Activity Theory approaches contribute to how we understand learning, practices and organisations.

This article focuses on the conditions that are conducive to effective work on reducing children's vulnerability to social exclusion. It draws on three studies of practitioners who are collaborating to prevent the social exclusion of children and young people. Two ideas are discussed: distributed expertise and relational agency. Distributed expertise recognises that expertise is distributed across local systems and that practitioners need to become adept at recognising, drawing on and contributing to it. Relational agency offers a finer‐grained analysis of what is involved in working in systems of distributed expertise. Findings include the need for professionals to develop relational agency as an extra layer of expertise alongside their core professional expertise and a concern that interprofessional work may result in seeing clients as tasks to be worked on rather than people to be worked with relationally. Implications for training and professional development are outlined.

Evidence from two studies of social exclusion based in England are drawn on to suggest that responsible agency can be seen as a feature of resilience. I argue that this agency, or capacity to act effectively in the world, is developed relationally and is evident in people's thoughtful actions in their worlds, but is also contingent on the affordances for such action in any environment. That is, resilience can be seen as responsible engagement with one's world as well as a capacity to withstand difficulties. The theoretical basis of this argument is Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) which proposes that we are shaped by but also shape our worlds. The implications for professional practices are discussed.

This paper reports the results of a study of sixty selected British and Australian academic texts on social policy and the welfare state. The purpose of the study was to investigate changes over the last fifteen years in the ways in which the position of women and gender‐related issues are dealt with by feminist and non‐feminist writers in the social policy field. Differences in the levels of feminist awareness in the various texts are found to be associated with the sex of the author, the type of book, the date of publication, the country of publication, and the socio‐political and intellectual context in which the various texts were produced.

The sociological literature on prisons contains some confusion and disagreement on at least three interrelated issues: the character of inmate society, the forms of inmate adaptive behaviour and the nature and extent of prison socialization. This paper suggests a new inmate typology (based on a differentiation between interaction with various membership groups and identification with different reference groups) and describes for each type the degree and kind of socialization (and prisonization) likely to be experienced. Finally some of the theoretical and practical implications for prisons and for the individual prisoner of such a typology are discussed.