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Professions, as a special (privileged) category of service‐sector occupations, are nowadays perceived as under threat from organizational, economic and political changes. Many of these threats concern the medical profession (and sometimes the legal profession). The use of the discourse of professionalism in other occupational contexts is seldom addressed, however, yet it is this, which is providing a much more interesting challenge to social scientists. In this paper the increased deployment of the concept “professional” is critically discussed and the power of the discourse of professionalism is explored more closely. The increased use of “professionalism” in new and existing occupational contexts is considered as a mechanism for facilitating and promoting social and occupational change. Many of these occupations provide services and often women constitute the bulk of the practitioners in these occupational groups. It is time to look again then at professionalism as a set of persuasive ideas or an ideology and to examine the power of these ideas and this discourse in terms of social order and control of occupational groups and individual “professionalised” practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to explore different health care professionals’ discourse about privacy – its definition and importance in health care, and its role in their day-to-day work. Professionals’ discourse about privacy reveals how new technologies and laws challenge existing practices of information control within and between professional groups in health care, with implications not only for patient privacy, but also for the role of information control in professions more generally.

The authors conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with n=83 doctors, nurses, and health information professionals in two academic medical centers and one veteran’s administration hospital/clinic in the Northeastern USA. Interview responses were qualitatively coded for themes and patterns across groups were identified.

The health care providers and the authors studied actively sought to uphold the protection (and control) of patient information through professional ethics and practices, as well as through the use of technologies and compliance with legal regulations. They used discourses of professionalism, as well as of law and technology, to sometimes accept and sometimes resist changes to practice required in the changing technological and legal context of health care. The authors found differences across professional groups; for some, protection of patient information is part of core professional ethics, while for others it is simply part of their occupational work, aligned with organizational interests.

This qualitative study of physicians, nurses, and health information professionals revealed some differences in views and practices for protecting patient information in the changing technological and legal context of health care that suggest some professional groups (doctors) may be more likely to resist such changes and others (health information professionals) will actively adopt them.

New technologies and regulations are changing how information is used in health care delivery, challenging professional practices for the control of patient information that may change the value or meaning of medical records for different professional groups.

Qualitative findings suggest that professional groups in health care vary in the extent of information control they have, as well in how they view such control. Some groups may be more likely to (be able to) resist changes in the professional control of information that stem from new technologies or regulatory policies. Some professionals recognize that new IT systems and regulations challenge existing social control of information in health care, with the potential to undermine (or possibly bolster) professional self-control for some but not necessarily all occupational groups.

This paper seeks to analyze how institutional arrangements and discourses shape law enforcement professionalization efforts, to identify opportunities and potential problems associated with professionalization, and to propose research to address practitioner interests in education and training and public interests in accountability and service equity.

The paper explores discourses surrounding law enforcement professionalization efforts to identify implementation barriers and potential consequences. It reviews earlier literatures and analyzes occupational standards data, utilizing a communicative perspective to investigate professionalization problems that have often been approached from political or economic perspectives.

Although law enforcement is often urged to professionalize, educational standards for officers remain low. There is no clear nexus between college curriculum and law enforcement as a profession. This paper shows that competing discourses about professionalization in general and law enforcement in particular undermine efforts to establish professional status and increased standards for law enforcement.

Future research should include greater cross‐sectional data analysis. Investigation of law enforcement standards or professionalization should account for social discourses that contribute to norms and expectations.

Law enforcement agencies and criminal justice programs have opportunities to better coordinate practice and scholarship. Failure to attend to institutional relationships and the role of communication in shaping professional standards will hamper advances in either field.

The paper shows that professional norms shape law enforcement accountability to the public in critical and sometimes unintended ways.

Previous authors have not considered social discourse impacts on law enforcement standards and professionalization, nor their relationship to higher education. By introducing these variables, barriers and alternative approaches are revealed.

The purpose of this paper is to add a little piece to the research on boundary work and inter-occupational cooperation by addressing two questions: how do actors perform boundary work in an inter-occupational cooperation project that seeks to improve the personnel health work in a hospital setting? What impact does the boundary work have on such cooperation in the personnel health project?

The study is based on individual, in-depth interviews and participative observations of focus group discussions conducted at a regional municipal organization in Sweden. Respondents are hospital line managers, experts and strategists in the HR departments, and experts from the internal occupational health service.

The concepts on boundary work, which include closing/opening boundary strategies, provide the framework for the empirical illustrations. The cooperation runs smoothly in the rehabilitation work because of an agreed upon process in which the professionals’ jurisdictions are preserved through closing strategies. Illness prevention and health promotion are not areas of inter-occupational cooperation because the stronger actors use closing strategies. While the weaker actors, who try to cooperate, use opening boundary strategies in these areas, they are excluded or marginalized.

The empirical investigation concerns one cooperation project and was completed at one data collection point.

No similar study of boundary work and inter-occupational cooperation in a hospital setting is available despite the frequency of this professional group configuration in practice. A more inclusive concept of professionalism may facilitate the study of boundary work and inter-occupational cooperation among actors with different professional authority.

Activation policies are key elements of contemporary welfare reform throughout Europe. The purpose of this paper is to explore the consequences of more active and individualised welfare policies for conceptualisations of professionalism and competence in the welfare services.

The primary data are 25 qualitative interviews with street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) conducted in two local offices in The Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV). These data were supplemented by relevant policy documents. A distinction between the authorities discourse of organisational professionalism and the SLBs discourse of occupational professionalism is applied to structure the analysis.

Efforts to professionalise activation work takes place in the absence of a specific professional knowledge base to guide daily work. The paper explores how relevant competence and skills are defined in such a context, both from the perspective of the authorities and from the front-level workers themselves. A key finding is that such competence tends to be defined in terms of the ability to manage communicative processes and relations. Paradoxically, the active turn in social policy with its emphasis on work and activity seems to entail a competence ideal that is inward looking and psychologised.

The qualitative approach implies limited generalisability in terms of statistical representativity. Furthermore, the results invite closer studies of the practical effects for social security users of the identified patterns.

Policy makers who aim to make welfare services more work orientated should look for ways of increasing SLBs concrete relations with and practical experience from collaboration with employers. This may entail reviewing the practice of outsourcing the implementation of active measures to private actors.

The paper adds to a small literature on the implementation of activation policy in contemporary welfare states.

There have been profound changes in the Portuguese national health system (NHS), instigated under the influence of managerialism and the new public management (NPM) “philosophy”. These changes have been in line with what has happened in other developed countries. At the beginning of the new century, important reforms that emphasised the efficient use of scarce resources were implemented. The objective of this study is to understand how nurses are adapting to a more managerial environment, one in which economic rationalism and market‐driven initiatives are the key principles behind the health reforms.

A qualitative study was developed, based on semi‐structured interviews with 83 nurses with managerial duties in ten hospitals in Portugal. All interviews were tape‐recorded and each interviewee's discourses were subjected to content analysis.

Data analysis led to the conclusion that under the new logic of the market and managerialism, these professionals have tried to (re)define their professionalisation route by emphasising the importance of care but also by trying to incorporate management as their dominant role in the social division of work. In reconfiguring their notion of professionalism, nurses were incorporating new practices in their day‐to‐day activities. This empirical study confirms that professionalism can also be conceptualised as a technology of self‐control being able to discipline professionals at the micro level.

This research is an empirical study based on the effects of managerialism on nurses with managerial duties in Portugal. This study contributes to a better understanding of the complex process of the professionalisation of nurses in a context of institutional change.

Concomitant with the trend towards specialisation in UK accountancy and the rise of relatively separate formal spheres of professional work along formal specialisms such as tax, audit and management consultancy, women entered the profession in unprecedented numbers, but not evenly distributed across those specialisms. This paper aims to draw on the sociology of accountancy and feminist studies of the professions to show that specialisms have emerged through and, in turn, have been shaped and recreated by gender as well as other processes.

The paper's research approach combines the sociology of professions with critical gender studies. It draws on interviews, brochures, web pages, and results from a questionnaire survey to investigate professional identities within UK accountancy.

Accountants' self-articulated notions of professionalism in the different specialisms are gendered and ordered hierarchically. Gender is an encompassing conceptual frame for ordering discursive attributes of the different specialisms. Working long and unpredictable hours was central to accountants' understandings of their professional life. Socialising with clients was seen as functional in bringing new opportunities to the firm. Socialising with peers also was deemed important, especially in solving internal frictions and in controlling new entrants' behaviour in firms. The more “public” the ideology of a specialism, the more masculine it was perceived to be.

This study challenges the uniform representations of professional identities offered by previous studies. It suggests that gender offers a discursive and ideological frame of reference for accountancy whose relevance extends beyond the working practices of men and women to the very constitution of the profession. It does so with reference to an original mix of qualitative and quantitative data.

This paper aims to discuss the challenge for the classical idea of professionalism in understanding the Chinese software engineering industry after giving a close insight into the development of this industry as well as individual engineers with a psycho‐societal perspective.

The study starts with the general review of the sociological concept of profession, professional and specialization of knowledge. Together with revealing the critical challenge from the empirical field of software engineering industry regarding its professionalization, a critique of the neglect of subjective agency in classical conception of professionalism in sociology theory and methodology is set out.

A case study with interpretation of the subject's continuously developing identification with their specialization in knowledge and occupation from their narration of career experience reveals the dynamics in this development process relating to individual, social practice and societal factors.

This paper contributes to empirical research of analyzing the professionalization process of software engineering and software engineers in relation to the concept of professionalism, and it contributes theoretically by discussing the challenge of this process to the development of professionalism within this highly knowledge‐based industry in a Chinese societal context.

The purpose of this article is to ascertain empirically to what extent we can quantify an occupational shift, where a new type of bureaucracy of organisational professionals is on the rise in tertiary educational institutions in New Zealand. Furthermore, the objective is also to present accountability as the prime factor behind the changes.

The analytical strategy of the study takes a point of departure in the distinction between occupational and organisational professionals in the public sector in general, and more specifically in tertiary education (TE). Based on these new categorisations, the authors have used various descriptive historical statistics (both national and institutional) to estimate changes over time.

The article finds, in line with some international research, that there has been a comparatively higher growth of organisational professionals in TE in New Zealand, and a significantly higher growth than in the private sector and in the overall public services. The authors hypothesise that this growth can be associated with accountability (both vertical and horizontal) as the dominant notion in TE.

This article takes a different approach than the existing literature on administrative intensity in TE by looking at occupational changes rather than changes in institutions budgets. This article also confirms some of the findings in the growing international literature on changes in professional roles.

Based on critical theory and dialectical thought, discusses and outlines a framework for understanding corporate culture as corporate hegemony. First, offers the relevance of critical theory to the study of corporate culture as a managerial praxis and organizational discourse. Second, examines three aspects of the dialectics of corporate culture: the dialectical tensions between corporate and individual identity; the conflicting pressure for uniformity and diversity; and the dialectics of empowerment and disempowerment. Third, discusses the mechanisms for the hegemonic perpetuation of corporate culture by researchers and practitioners and for resisting a critical stance in the discourse of corporate culture. Fourth, and finally, the article examines possible ways for overcoming the problem of cultural hegemony in organization theory and praxis.