ABSTRACT
This chapter looks across the specific dilemmas of professional practice amidst these governing regimes to reconsider the question of how professional responsibility might be reconceptualised from a sociomaterial perspective. In issues of professional responsibility, however, the key questions have to do with guaranteeing quality, safety and reliability of service while meeting ethical obligations to clients, which traditionally have been identified in terms such as autonomy, beneficence and non-maleficence. They juggled not only the requisite actions but also the different form of professionalism, and the different professional identity, demanded respectively by practices of audit and of compassion. Sociomaterial approaches focus attention not on who is responsible, but how responsibility is enacted and often enacted differently at different points among these associations. This sociomaterial juggling suggests a conception of professional responsibility that decentres the individual and materialises the moral in a set of complex relations.
