It is generally accepted that the lives and work of teachers and nurses have become more complex, complicated and contested in a climate increasingly imbued with neo-liberal agenda. Nevertheless, despite the homogenising tendency created by these 'market forces', within national borders and cultures these influences continue to be 'refracted' differently, leading to a rich and varied tapestry of policies and practices. In the first instance therefore, the challenge taken up in this paper, despite differing traditions and trajectories, to indicate and illustrate dominant themes in the lives and work of nurses and teachers in seven jurisdictions, while seeking simultaneously to indicate difference and distinctness. Secondly, through a more reflexive lens, the emergent cross-national comparative themes discussed in the first part of the paper are problematised from a methodological perspective, while the concluding section of the paper seeks to identify some 'situated certainty'; to arrive at a set of robust propositions that seem warranted by the evidence, and not withstanding the problematics of conducting such a study.