Post-professionalism - Part 8 - Key readings
It’s been a few weeks since the last instalment in this series on post-professionalism, which began back in June.
You can find the earlier posts here:
In this post I want to highlight some of the key texts in the post-professional literature.
Five key texts
Edgar Burns’s Theorising professions: A sociological introduction Link does as much as any text to lay out the argument for why we have now entered a post-professional era. If you read only one book on post-professionalism, this would be the one I would recommend.
If you wanted a general introduction to the contemporary conditions now producing post-professionalism, you might look at Richard and Daniel Susskind’s excellent The future of the professions Link.
The origins of our understanding of post-professionalism lies in post-Marxian and neo-Weberian sociology of the 1970s, which radically critiqued professionals’ claims to goodness and expertise. A lot of that work (see, for instance, Johnson, Larson, Witz, Abbott, et al below) started with Eliot Freidson’s iconoclastic The profession of medicine: A study of the sociology of applied knowledge Link.
But perhaps the most scathing attack on the professions came from three 1970s masterpieces by Ivan Illich: Medical nemesis Link and Disabling professions Link, all predated by Deschooling society Link (with its nod to Jacques Rancière’s The ignorant schoolmaster referenced below).
And we cannot talk of post-professionalism without mentioning Silvia Federici’s groundbreaking 1975 feminist study Wages against housework Link.
Some notable additions:
Abbott A. (1998). The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Fournier V. (2000). Boundary work and the (un)making of the professions. In: Malin N, editor. Professionalism, boundaries and the workplace. Abongdon, Oxon: Routledge. p. 67-86.
Johnson T. (1972). Professions and power. London: Macmillan.
Larson MS. (1977). The rise of professionalism: A sociological analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rancière J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Starr, P. (1982). The social transformation of American medicine. New York: Basic Books.
Witz A. (1992). Professions and patriarchy. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Some current thinking
In recent years most of the sociological work has focused on the margins of traditional professional territory, either in the form of new professional work or new professional identities (Kronblad & Jensen, 2023; Hayes, Kulkarni & Lee, 2023). Much of this has focused on forms of ‘hybrid’ professionalism — an almost ubiquitous term in the literature today.
Perhaps the most heavily cited work in recent times comes from Mirko Noordegraaf and his team in Utrecht. Noordegraaf introduced the concept of ‘connective professionalism’ (Noordegraaf et al, 2014; 2015), arguing that new professional work will be much more about connection than boundary protection. Some have suggested this only replaces one bad hegemony with another form of ‘ideal type’ professional identity (Adams et al, 2020).
And in healthcare, a great deal of work is now going into professional work in aged care, new approaches caring and therapeutic work, and the clamour for regulation of a raft of new professions (see, Kamp & Dybbroe, 2023; Sedda & Hussan, 2023; Syrigou & Williams, 2023).
References
Adams, T. L., Clegg, S., Eyal, G., Reed, M., & Saks, M. (2020). Connective professionalism: Towards (yet another) ideal type. Journal of Professions and Organization, 7(2), 224-233. https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joaa013
Hayes, C., Kulkarni, C., & Kee, K. F. (2023). The situational window for boundary-spanning infrastructure professions: Making sense of cyberinfrastructure emergence. Journal of Professions and Organization. https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joad007
Kamp, A., & Dybbroe, B. (2023). Training the ageing bodies: New knowledge paradigms and professional practices in elderly care. Sociol Health Illn. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13675
Kronblad, C., & Jensen, S. H. (2023). ‘Being a professional is not the same as acting professionally’—How digital technologies have empowered the creation and enactment of a new professional identity in law. Journal of Professions and Organization. https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joad005
Noordegraaf, M., Van Der Steen, M., & Van Twist, M. (2014). Fragmented or connective professionalism? Strategies for professionalizing the work of strategists and other (organizational) professionals. Public Administration, 92(1), 21-38. https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12018
Noordegraaf, M. (2015). Hybrid professionalism and beyond: (New) Forms of public professionalism in changing organizational and societal contexts. Journal of Professions and Organization, 2(2), 187-206. https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/jov002
Sedda, P., & Hussan, O. (2023). Social media influencer: a new hybrid professionalism in the age of platform capitalism? In L. Maestripieri & A. Bellini (Eds.), Professionalism and Social Change: Processes of Differentiation Within, Between and Beyond Professions. Palgrave Macmillan. https://hal.science/hal-03700657
Syrigou, A., & Williams, S. (2023). Professionalism and professionalization in human resources (HR): HR practitioners as professionals and the organizational professional project. Journal of Professions and Organization. https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joad008