Mapmaking and the (re)organization of professional practice

Combining insights from sociology and geography, we examine how professionals organize professional relations, beyond the boundaries of their professional groups and through the process of mapmaking. We take the Netherlands as our case study. Here, between 2009 and 2015, the Ministry of Health initiated a program that stimulated professionals to develop alternative organizational formats for the provision of integrated primary care. Two of the funded projects used mapping techniques in order to give direction to such integrated organizational formats. Based on the literature, we develop and deploy an analytical framework that aims to capture: (1) how professionals shaped interprofessional relations through mapmaking; and (2) what the organizational consequences were of the maps developed. We reveal how professionals differentiated between elements during the mapmaking process. We furthermore demonstrate how such differentiations shaped the developed maps in particular ways. This, in turn, influenced whether and how these maps gave direction to new organizational formats. We close this article with three points that scholars need to take into account when studying mapmaking in order to gain processual and dynamic insight into the organization of professional practice.

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