THE END OF THE PROFESSIONS?

Abstract

Readers of this volume are likely to have a fairly well developed understanding of what it means to be a professional or to behave professionally, an understanding that will have been developed by an extended period of formal or informal training and enculturation as well as day-to-day practice in our working lives. It follows that, perhaps, readers may also have been attracted to this volume because they are aware of the ways in which their perceived professional status is being degraded. In many areas, as discussed in the chapters presented here, institutionalised control is being degraded by the introduction of systems of individual accountability based on customer reaction. We are all facing and coping with differing degrees of success, the stresses and contradictions of changing work and organisational practices. To many of us this may seem like an end to professionalism as we perceive it. The norms and routines that have served us well are being cast as outdated practices unsuited to a new era and we are in the course of developing new understandings of what is meant by the term professionalism.

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