‘You need to bond with the ones you train’: mixing epistemic cultures in medical residency training

This paper addresses contemporary reform in postgraduate medical education that aims to standardise training. The reforms are guided by public policy interventions to increase quality of care, objectify performance, and to prepare residents for changing health care needs. This paper draws on an ethnographic study in the Netherlands, studying how new training standards have been incorporated in everyday gynaecology and surgery residency training. Perceiving educational science as a new epistemic culture alongside the traditional professional authority-based epistemic culture, the paper examines how both epistemic cultures have interweaved, fabricating a new training culture that assembles both traditional and 'new' elements.