Abstracts - Earli

young people and prevent their social exclusion. The particular focus is a school which is locatedwithin a city which is reconfiguring the professional practices of people who work with vulnerablechildren. Using frameworks and processes derived from activity theory we have examined thesocial practices, and positions taken with in them, in both the school and the services which arereconfiguring around it. In this paper we examine how the way that the school categorises pupilsunsurprisingly sustains the historical purposes of schooling in England with an emphasis on socialcontrol. Particular attention is paid to how these categories are currently also used to strengthen theboundaries between the school and other services at a time when these boundaries are underpressure from external agencies who want new forms of relational collaboration.Error, blame and responsibility in child welfare: Problematics of governance in an invisible tradeSusan White, Human & Health Sciences, Univ. of Huddersfield, United KingdomChris Hall, Human & Health Sciences, Univ. of Huddersfield, United KingdomSue Peckover, Human & Health Sciences, Univ. of Huddersfield, United KingdomAndy Pithouse, Social Sciences, Cardiff University, United KingdomDavid Wastell, Nottingham University Business School, United KingdomThis paper presents preliminary findings from a study examining the impact of the anticipation of‘error’ or ‘blame’ on the everyday work of professionals in child welfare services in the UK,particularly those involving the protection/safeguarding of children at risk. We know that childwelfare professionals have to negotiate complex decision-making activities for which they feel andare held accountable. These can be decisions about risk for example, or may be about resourceallocations, or aspects of performance management. Different managerial levels may be more, orless affected by these different accountabilities, but they create an extremely complex set of tasks,which are generally poorly understood and over-simplified in both media and policy debates. Inthis study, we explore how practitioners and managers learn about and cope with these, oftencompeting, demands. The study involves 2 phases: 1. Ethnography (in various sites over a sixmonth period) 2. Micro-world simulations based on the ethnography and customised to eachorganisational setting. These are derived from cognitive ergonomics where for many yearscomputer simulations of complex decision tasks have been used to analyse judgement-makingwhere people are making complex decisions, having regard to range of often competing demands,in conditions of uncertainty. These ideas are starting to be used to understand medical decisionmaking.We apply these to child welfare seeking to understand the ways in which people invokevarious moral and administrative accountabilities in their attempts to balance risk and resources.Reliability and trust in psychological examinations: learning through practiceMichele Grossen, Department of Psychology, University of Lausanne, SwitzerlandStephanie Lauvergeon, Department of Psychology, University of Lausanne, SwitzerlandDouchka Florez, Department of Psychology, University of Lausanne, SwitzerlandConsidering that psychological examination is a social and institutional activity, we propose tostudy the situated use of tests through the lens of socio-cultural psychology and other relatedstrands. Within this framework, we carried out a study in which 17 psychologists from threepsychological services for children and adolescents were interviewed about their use of tests inpsychological examination. Our aim was to document the reported practices which practitionersheld to be relevant in order to perform a reliable psychological assessment. We shall focus upon atopic which recurrently appeared in the psychologists’ discourse: test reliability. In fact, thepsychologists repetitively expressed their concern for the conditions which make the test resultsreliable and enable them to fully assume the responsibility of their assessment and to appear as– 602 –