Professional Talk: Unpacking Professional Language

Modern welfare states have increasingly been infused by principles from New Public Management. The implicit managerialism and standardization of these principles reduces the autonomy of professionals and displaces their discretionary power, replacing it with a standardized professional language that reproduces and reinforces specific narratives of knowledge. This chapter explores why and how we can reconnect the intimacy between word and experience by unpacking professional language. I address the following questions: What are the challenges of interviewing professionals? What is there to discover in the unpacking of professional language? And how do we unpack professional words, discourse and jargon when interviewing professionals? In the chapter, I use empirical examples from studies of professionals working in kindergartens and the child welfare services in Norway.