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IDEOLOGY Professionalism as ideology Critical attacks on professions in general as powerful, privileged, self-interested monopolies, that were prominent in the neo-Weberian research literature of the 1970s and 1980s, resulted in a general scepticism about the whole idea of professionalism as a normative value. Johnson, for example, dismissed professionalism as a successful ideology which had entered the political vocabulary of a wide range of occupational groups in their claims and competition for status and income (1972:32). More recently Davies (1996) has urged researchers to abandon claims to professionalism and instead to recognize the links between such claims and a specific historical and cultural construction of masculinity which fits uneasily with newer and more feminized professions. During the 1970s and 1980s, when sociological analysis of professions was dominated by various forms of professionalism as ideology theorizing, one concept that became prominent was the ‘professional project'. The concept was developed by Larson (1977) and included a detailed and scholarly historical account of the processes and developments whereby a distinct occupational group sought a monopoly in the market for its service, and status and upward mobility (collective as well as individual) in the social order. The idea of a professional project was developed in a different way by Abbott (1988) who examined the carving out and maintenance of a jurisdiction through competition and the requisite cultural and other work that was necessary to establish the legitimacy of the monopoly practice. Larson's work is still frequently cited and MacDonald's textbook on professions (1995) continues to use and to support her analysis in his examination of the professional field of accountancy. The outcome of the successful professional project was a ‘monopoly of competence legitimised by officially sanctioned “expertise”, and a monopoly of credibility with the public' (Larson 1977:38). Larson's interpretation has not gone unchallenged. Freidson (1982) preferred market ‘shelters' to complete monopolies in professional service provision, which indicated the incomplete nature of most market closure projects. It is also the case that Larson's careful analysis has been oversimplified by enthusiastic supporters such that some researchers talk about the professional project, as if professions and professional associations do nothing else apart from protecting the market monopoly for their expertise. One aspect of Larson's work is of particular interest in this paper, however. Larson asked why and how a set of work practices and relations that characterized medicine and law came to become a rallying call for a whole set of knowledge-based occupations in very different employment conditions. This question points to the importance of the appeal and attraction of the concept of professionalism to occupational workers themselves in all types of society in the modern world. Another version of the professionalism as ideology interpretation has been the notion of professions as powerful occupational groups who not only closed markets and dominated and controlled other occupations in the field but also could ‘capture' states and negotiate ‘regulative bargains' (Cooper et al. 1988) with states in the interests of their own practitioners. Again this was an aspect of theorizing about professions in Anglo-American societies which began in the 1970s (e.g. Johnson 1972) and which focused on medicine and law. It has been a particular feature of analysis of the medical profession (e.g. Larkin 1983) where researchers have interpreted relations between health professionals as an aspect of medical dominance as well as gender relations (e.g. Davies 1995).
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