Liminal Becomings: The Professionalization Project of Peer Support Workers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some groups of practitioners seeking professionalization seem to remain stuck in-between the community and professional sectors. Peer support workers in mental health care are a case in point. Peer support workers are increasingly recognized for their unique role as past of multidisciplinary teams, and hired as paid providers. Yet, despite decades of efforts and the support of allies, in most parts of the world, they have not acquired the full professional status they have been pursuing. Based on a longitudinal case study conducted from 2015 to 2024 – involving extensive participant observation, interviews with key actors, and historical documents – we analyze the longstanding struggle of peer support workers to carve out a work jurisdiction within the professional sector of mental health care in the Canadian province of Quebec. Using liminality as a theoretical lens, we investigate how the role of peer support workers in-between the community and professional sectors is creating ambiguity and tensions that might both enable and harm their project. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings for organizational studies of liminality and professionalization projects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".