Changing Professional Forms and Identities in the Face of the NeoLiberal Challenge

1
Changing Professional Forms and Identities in the
Face of the Neo-Liberal Challenge 

• Michael Reed
• Professor of Organisational Analysis
• Cardiff University
• June 2009

2
Introduction 

• Is professionalism, as the third logic of
  occupational control and work organization, in
  terminal decline (Freidson Professionalism The
  Third Logic, 2001)?
• If markets and firms (or hierarchies) are
  the first and second logics for organizing and
  controlling expert work, then is profession, as
  the third logic, able to cope with the
  neo-liberal challenge?
• How has professionalism changed, over the course
  of the last three decades or so, in the course of
  responding to the threats and opportunities
  presented by the neo-liberal challenge
  particularly in Anglo-American political
  economies/welfare systems?
• How have established professional forms and
  identities changed in the light of changing
  economic, political and cultural conditions
  experienced within Anglo-American systems since
  the late 1970s/early 1980s?
•  

3
The Neo-Liberal Challenge 

• Increasing cultural power and influence of
  neo-liberal ideology and discourse which rejects
  any restraints on the free movement of goods,
  services and people
• Globalization of professional services
• The ICT revolution and the rise of
  network-based forms of organizing and governance
• Progressive economic and political deregulation
• Increasing dominance of market-based mechanisms
  for pricing and allocating services
• Diffusion of consumerist ideology and
  individualist ethic the new individualism

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• New monitoring and audit technologies such as
  performance management
• Declining cultural capital, authority and
  autonomy of specialist expertise
• Rise of managerialism and management as new
  ways for thinking about and organizing specialist
  services
• Expansion of knowledge-intensive sectors and
  organizations such as creative industries and
  the knowledge workers (symbolic analysts)
  which they employ
• Growing crisis of confidence in established
  professions which is exacerbated by a series of
  dramatic failures in self-regulation and
  management that reinforces underlying move
  towards low trust/high control syndrome

5

• Cumulative effect of these structural,
  ideological and political changes is to pose
  major and sustained threat to the continued
  dominance of the system of professions as it
  had evolved in the Anglo-American political
  economies and welfare systems since the
  nineteenth century
•  
•  

6
Professionalism in Crisis? 

• Professionalization as dominant strategy for
  organizing and controlling expert work through
  occupational closure and organizational
  segmentation under threat from state-sponsored
  and market-based deregulation of service
  provision
• Professionalism as dominant principle of
  institutional legitimation and authorization of
  expert practice under attack from political
  ideologies and economic policies that extol the
  virtues of unencumbered individualism and
  unrestricted liberalization (Spanish practices
  or conspiracy against the laity)
• Profession as dominant occupational form and
  organizational practice for developing, providing
  and evaluating specialist/expert services and
  skills under attack because of its perceived
  failure to sustain internal ethical codes ( both
  written and unwritten) and protect internal
  regulative machinery (move from high
  trust/loosely regulated autonomy to low
  trust/tightly regulated control)
•  

7
Changing Professional Identities 

• Cultural identity and status of professional
  work/workers more openly contested and uncertain
  in a world that is increasingly disposed to
  question claims to privilege and autonomy on the
  part of powerful interest groups
•  
• Marketization/deregulation of specialist services
  through increased global competition and
  decreased political intervention generating an
  increasingly fragmented system of professions
  (Abbott The System of Professions 1988) in
  which expert workers have to compete for business
  and survival without the relative stability and
  continuity provided by the previous regulative
  regimes

8

• Decline in institutionalized trust and assumed
  moral status raises serious questions concerning
  the future cultural legitimacy and identity of
  professional work/workers insofar as it seems
  to erode, if not emasculate, the ideological and
  ethical foundations of professionalism as the
  third logic
•  

9
   Ideal Types of Professional Futures

• Engineers of Human Souls
• Faceless Technocrats
• Merchants of Morality
• Each of these ideal types (theoretical
  models/thought experiments) provides a very
  different reading of how professions and
  professionals can most effectively respond to the
  increasingly questioning, not to say hostile,
  political and cultural environment in which they
  find themselves
• They also provide very different assessments of
  the nature of the professional futures that
  realistically seem to be on offer to accredited
  experts in a world where specialist services are
  more freely available than ever before but only
  come at a price.
•  

10
Engineers of Human Souls

• Professionals as a republic of experts who
  exercise their specialist knowledge and skills on
  behalf of the general good rather than any
  particular sectional interest
• An elitist cultural identity in which social
  legitimacy stems from the collective benefits
  that professionalism and professionals bring to
  society as whole
•  
• Specialist expertise brings social, economic and
  cultural progress to modern societies that are
  prepared to recognize and support the vital and
  indispensable contribution that specialist make
  to modernization (professionalism as a
  necessarily progressive force and movement)
•  
• Professionalism and professionals are
  functionally indispensable to the scientific,
  technological and economic progress that modern
  societies take for granted and they are
  culturally indispensable to the democratic,
  pluralistic and meritocratic values that such
  societies wish to instil and sustain in their
  peoples
•  
•  

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• BUT
• Can this view be sustained in societies that
  increasingly prioritize the values of
  individualism, entrepreneurialism and
  competition over those associated with
  collectivism, meritocracy and collaboration?
•  
•  

12
Faceless Technocrats

• Professionals have no choice but to adapt to
  entrepreneurialism and managerialism in that
  they have to transform themselves into
  technocratic specialists at the service of the
  market or market proxies if they are to survive
  much less flourish in a globally competitive and
  unforgiving world
•  
• Thus, its the technical, rather than the
  moral, benefits to be derived from specialist
  expertise that will be the key to maintaining
  professional identity and autonomy within an
  increasingly marketed/deregulated economy and
  society
•  
• Indeed, modern professionalism is fundamentally
  based on the integration of credentialism,
  meritocracy and technocracy and this
  integrated regime of beliefs, values and
  discourses will need to be revived and revivified
  if modern professionalism is to sustain itself as
  a pro-active social force and organizational form
  in the future
•  

13

• BUT
• Is this return to the technocratic vision of
  professionalism viable in a world where
  consumer populism and user empowerment are
  the dominant cultural icons and
• ideologies (professionals on tap rather than
  op top)

14
Merchants of Morality 

• Jettison the public face/official pretence of
  generalized moral authority and accept, indeed
  embrace, the political and cultural reality of an
  emerging new economy of power (even though its
  been in the making since the mid-late eighteenth
  century!) based on the delicate mechanisms and
  instruments of professional disciplinary
  surveillance and control (Foucault Society must
  be Protected, 2003)
• View of professionalization, professionalism and
  professionals from below rather than from
  above that is, the unofficial or hidden
  history of the 3Ps
• Professionals will continue to play a central
  role in fabricating the expert theories on which
  the human sciences depend and in designing and
  implementing the practical reform programmes and
  control technologies that flow from them they
  will provide the means through which various
  groups wherever they are located within a
  societys power structures attempt to pursue
  their aims and projects but they will also find
  themselves increasingly subject to the theories,
  programmes and technologies that they have
  developed, designed and implemented
•  

15

• BUT
•  
• Does this mean that professional service markets
  and organizational forms will continue to be
  based on distrust, contestation and surveillance?
•  
•  
•  
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•  

16
Coda Where Do We Go From Here? 

• Inter-occupational fragmentation and
  intra-occupational polarization rather than
  proletarianization seem to be the emerging
  structural trajectories in the domain of
  professional services and the organizational
  forms through which they are provided and
  legitimated
• Major implications for professional cultural
  identities and organizational practices that are
  viable and sustainable in the longer term
• Little or no chance of a return to the halcyon
  days of the high trust/low control regime in
  which the once dominant professional cultural
  stereotypes (naturally trusted, widely
  respected, culturally protected and
  well-rewarded) can be sustained

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• But, relatively new and robust, forms of
  organizational professionalism and their
  supporting ideological systems and discursive
  practices seem to be in the course of
  establishing themselves and demonstrating the
  requisite degree of structural flexibility and
  cultural heterogeneity (Faulconbridge and Muzio
  2008)
• Yet, what are the longer term implications of the
  global economic recession that we are now
  experiencing for the long-term prospects
  structurally, ideologically, politically and
  culturally of the professions (see Guardian
  20.3.09 and 13.5.09 for UK professions)
• Professional knowledge is only what the
  occupational group can annexe and hold on to. The
  advantages they derive from it are only those
  that their professional project can achieve in a
  particular historical contextWhat does the
  profession do next? In the same way that the
  rewards of the professional project are attained
  by steady, constant effort on the part of members
  and their organization, they are only retained by
  comparable exertion. The condition of
  professional monopoly, like that of liberty, is
  eternal vigilance (MacDonald Professional
  Work, 2006, 375-380).
•  

18

• BUT
• What happens when liberty and professionalism are
  seen to be in direct opposition to one another
  that is, when the prevailing view seems to be
  that the more you get of the latter, the less you
  get of the former?
• ALSO
• What happens when the members and their
  organizationreact to an increasingly challenging
  environment in ways that seem to weaken their
  collective will and capacity to maintain control
  over their knowledge base, to find ways to
  combat the ever-present tendency for knowledge to
  become located in organizations and machines,
  rather than their members, to hold their own
  vis-à-vis the state, and to resist attempts at
  incursion into their jurisdiction by other
  occupations (MacDonald 2006 380)?
•  

19

• In short, what is the future for professionalism
  at a time and in a place when its cultural
  authority seems, at the very least, to be waning
  and where its organizational power seems to be
  constrained by external forces that weaken its
  internal cohesion and resolve?