Introduction
There is tremendous energy in current research and theorising about professions, professional work and professionalism . This opening chapter sets the context for the discussion about researching expertise and professions today: What are professions and why theorise them? Professions describe themselves via trait models that assume an essentialist view rarely made explicit or even understood. Challenging and reframing this view allows dynamic thinking and policymaking to more accurately understand and respond to contemporary changes in richer nations, developing nations and those at the geopolitical global edges. As Anderson (1972, p. 306) observes, âWe expect to encounter fascinating, and, I believe, very fundamental questions at each stage in fitting together less complicated pieces into the more complicated system and understanding the new types of behavior which can resultâ. In laying the groundwork for the book, this introductory chapter performs a series of tasks.
First, the sociology of expertise and professions studies is outlined as emerging from contemporary interest in professions for personal, historical and social reasons. Second, the chapter introduces readers to circuits of sociological study and inquiry in the sociology of professions field, and how professions occupy and sometimes dominate fields of expertise. Field is used as a rich concept more in the way Bourdieu (1991, 1993) uses it, rather than simply sectoral analysis. Third, an antipodean standpoint is articulated, in which the author owns the position of being simultaneously first world, and not first world, claiming a privileged but distanced perspective on western-dominated discourse, especially Anglo-American cultural beliefs about professions. This segues easily, fourth, to identifying and listing an array of theoretical approaches currently being pursued, not to adopt them, but to show the energy invested in professions research today.
The fifth and sixth tasks in this opening chapter reprise are to briefly name the philosophic concept of essentialism and then the concept of functionalism, while pointing to the twinned influence of these ideas. This helps inform readers unfamiliar with thinking about professionsâ assumed naturalness and how these ideas constrain understanding of professional expertise . Such assumptions hold research about professions back from accurate inquiry, and professions themselves from relevant policy participation, thereby contributing to present-day problems of adaptation and survival. Seventh, the chapter introduces the overall argument of the book, in which concepts of bundling and unbundling draw on Weberâs rationalisation logics, developed in later chapters. Eighth, the practical rationale for theorising professions in terms of cost, influence and importance in contemporary society is set out. Finally, brief notes sketch the main points of the chapters to follow.
Situating Contemporary Interest in Professions
The richer parts of the world have come to regard professions as indispensable to civic and general well-being and essential to how modern societies operate. Two huge changes in society today mark the urgent need to rethink the role and function of professions. The first change is the rapidly globalising and connecting world society. An underlying premise of this book is that what is commonly called professionalisation is a more specific phenomenon better called western professionalisation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More material that can be used here shows the emerging variety and priorities around professional work outside western societies, and particularly outside Anglo-American practices.
Professions are part of the complex and profound changes of the past two centuries that have ushered in dramatic changes in science, technology and the social organisation of modern western society. This is commonly called, at least in so-called western societies, modernity or the modern era, but more precise language is necessary in recognising that this narrative, though dominant, is only about western modernisation and may in the future seem merely the early phase of a fuller modernisation.
The second change, happening even faster than shifting global networks, is the digital technology revolution increasingly affecting every part of life and professional activity, not only in the direct use of digital and mobile tools. How knowledge is generated, accessed, distributed, resisted, authorised, applied and miss-applied, more and more in real timeâfor both individuals and at population levelsâwill change decision-making dramatically in the coming decades with all sorts of unexpected consequences, some positive, some negative.
Thus, the common-enough aspiration of parents in the last century for their children to achieve desired social status and income as perhaps doctors or lawyers starts to look very different today. Even back then, the era of high-elite professional aspirations and mobility was in conversation with previous eras in which different professions had occupied elevated prestige but had levels of technical efficacy lower than more mundane professional groups do today. The proliferation of many kinds of professions across the century, looking back from our present vantage point, was not a static thing despite debates and contests about who or what were the real professions? Even Wilenskyâs (1964) mid-twentieth-century typology recognised emergent and marginal categories of what could be included in the loaded term, âtrue professionsâ (Kimball 1995). That is, the very category âprofessionâ was not as clear-cut as broad public assertions suggested or are still suggesting today. The misinterpretation and time-limitedness of posing the question in this way are fortunately more easily unpicked and examined with hindsight afforded by the present century.
The search for appropriate twenty-first-century ways to theorise professions and professionalism finds a variety of candidates. Not many of these theories, however, construct comprehensive arguments that can be tested by comparative or historical means. Such accounts need to explain, first, late western modern social and occupational complexity and stratification , and second, the current evolution of professions into something beyond âmore of the sameâ narrativesâa notion that dominated up to Wilenskyâs time. Concepts like globalisation are very broad and often used loosely in reference to politics and corporations. What does globalisation mean at the level of specific institutional structures and professionsâ practices? What pressures for change, consequences of more cross-national interaction, local protection or comparative advantages and global value chains are in play today? To what degree can professions and professional groups (Evetts 2004) be considered as of a kind with other institutional formations in contemporary society, or how and why are they different?
We need to get beyond how this western phenomenon worked in the past, how it currently operates, or see how it works outside Anglo-western economies, to gain a more genuinely engaged global comprehension of professions. Attention to global implications of change in professional work is situated somewhere like talk about globalisation itself was two or three decades ago: a first round of articulation and engagement with the ideas identifying economic advantages, impacts and opportunities touted as inherently a good thing. With hindsight, this appears as the perspective of early modernising economic powerhouses of Western Europe and the United States (Euro-America). At that time globalisation meant more of what the western economies were doing, rolling this out to other parts of the world. In reality, these changes were by no means as simple as that, the relationship of globalisation being in significant ways asymmetrical in terms of advantage, wealth creation and relative social and economic benefit for the richer countries (Dietrich and Roberts 1997; Carillo and Zazzaro 2001). Transnationalism as a mode of analysing professions sits within this nascent reorientation.
In terms of innovation and new ways of creating and providing technical and professional services , globalisation initially benefited developed economies more. Several well-known scandals demonstrate this ...
