Professionalizing Contingency: How Journalism Schools Adapt to Deprofessionalization

Abstract

Abstract Many professional labor markets are currently experiencing signs of deprofessionalization, including automation of tasks and increasingly unstable employment conditions. Drawing on the case of journalism schools, this article examines how these shifts affect professional education, which has historically been positioned as a means to avoiding precarious employment. How do professional schools cope with inimical disruptions to the labor markets for which they are training students? Based on 113 in-depth interviews with faculty, staff, and administrators from 44 U.S. journalism programs, we argue that journalism schools have sought to reframe labor market instability as an inevitable and even desirable aspect of journalistic practice and professional identity. They do this by dismantling boundaries, valorizing entrepreneurialism, and seeking to alter institutional practices to emphasize skills over abstract knowledge. Taken together, we call this professionalizing contingency. As labor market precarity continues to spread within expert and professional fields, our findings have implications for broader sociological understandings of professional education.

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