Professionalism as a cultural form: Knowledge, craft, and moral agency

Abstract

Drawing on research on business associations and physicians’ associations, we argue here for a cultural theory of professions. ‘Professions’—or professionalism—should be understood primarily as forms of cultural claims-making about work. Whether or how professionalism as claims-making results in organizational forms or professionalizing projects is an empirical question. We also argue that professional claims-making relies not only on abstract expertise, as has been emphasized in previous theories, but also on craft knowledge infused with moral agency.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 33 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.