This paper investigates how health professions compete and cooperate in
addressing emerging local work tasks defined in relation to new globalized
health challenges, such as type 2 diabetes. It identifies which professional
groups have claimed responsibility for the tasks and by means of which kinds
of interactions and infighting. The materials entail workplace-related artefacts
and documents; in-depth interviews and extended conversations with health
professionals about goals, dilemmas, and practices linked to prevention of
lifestyle-related diseases; and site visits at Danish hospitals. Grounding
Abbott’s framework of jurisdictions and his meso-level vocabulary in a situated
account of professional boundary work, the analysis follows the ways that
nurses in particular create, and sometimes stabilize or standardize, techniques
for a disease prevention programme less than a decade old. The paper argues
that processual theory of boundary work would benefit from grounding in a
situated account of forms of professional boundaries within emerging
jurisdictional tasks.