The Discursive Construction of Collaborative Care

Abstract
Professionals make history in future‐oriented discursive actions that can be made visible and analysable. The article analyses sessions in which medical professionals, together with the patient and researcher‐interventionists, discuss the care of a patient with multiple chronic illnesses, aiming at the creation of a new, collaborative care practice. In these sessions, consequential decision‐making and future‐oriented envisioning are brought together. The analysis proceeds through three layers, from a substantive layer to a methodological layer and a metatheoretical layer. We argue that professional case meetings, enriched with an induced awareness of their history‐making potential, are microcosms in which collective zones of proximal development can be articulated and enacted as practitioners look back on the history of their activity and engage in future‐oriented framing experiments. For studies of professional discourse, such settings offer opportunities to capture how history is made in situated discursive actions. In these situations, researcher‐interventionists make themselves contestable and fallible participants of the discourse, which means that their actions also become objects of data collection and critical analysis.