Something old, something new, something borrowed: Explaining varieties of professionalism in citizen collaboration through identity theory

Abstract

Public professionals are increasingly involved in collaborative relationships with citizens to design, implement and evaluate public services. We investigate how actors derive a specific social identity from the institutional logic of cross-sectoral collaboration and how this social identity translates into the self-identities of professionals. Based on an analysis of 44 semi-structured interviews in Germany, we examine how public professionals combine the different social identities in collaborative projects and extract three varieties of professionalism: the protective professional, the tripartite professional and the collaboration professional. Our study contributes to recent discussions on hybrid identities and identity conflicts in public management. The findings raise questions on the compatibility of different social identities in collaborative settings and thus shed light on the difficulties public professionals face in citizen collaboration.