172 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Abbott (1988) had reasonable grounds for concluding that professional-
ism and professions, as the dominant principle and mode of occupational
control over highly abstract and specialized ‘expert labour’, could successfully
withstand and adapt to market-driven knowledge commodification and man-
agerially driven knowledge rationalization. Nonetheless, a decade and a half
later, his confidence, as that of others (Ackroyd 1996; Macdonald 1995), in
the underlying institutional resilience and innate organizational flexibility of
professionalism and professions may look significantly less secure in a con-
temporary world that values, indeed vaunts, ‘market populism’ as a universal
solution to all our economic, social, and ethical ills (Frank 2000).
When this state-sponsored and elite-supported, political drive to confront
professional power and to control professional autonomy is combined with
capitalist-led corporate restructuring and technologically driven work ration-
alization, it seems that ‘the writing is on the wall’ for professionalization and
professionalism as the dominant means of organizing and institutionalizing
expert services. It is at least conceivable that major restructuring of the inter-
national expert division of labour over the last two decades, as it responds
to the combined effects of economic, technological, political, and cultural
change, will have long-term implications for the system of professions and
its constituent member groups (Reed 1996). In so far as the power struggle
over abstract knowledge and the technical autonomy and cultural legitimacy
or ‘institutionalized trust’ that it conveys has become more intensely con-
tested as a result of these structural changes, then the work autonomy and
control of professional workers is likely to be fundamentally effected (Hanlon
1998, 2004). Further, the competition and status divisions between and within
professional associations and groups are likely to become more intense as
the jurisdictional domains, labour market niches, and organizational locales
in which they operate become more crowded, contested, deregulated, and
fragmented.
Indeed, as Freidson (2001: 212), a lifelong, if realistic, supporter of pro-
fessionalism as the ‘third logic’ of work organization and occupational asso-
ciation, has indicated in his most recent publication, it is highly likely that
many, if not most, professional workersare fated to become ‘merely technical
experts in the service of the political and cultural economy’. In turn, Freidson
(2001) continues, this will probably produce even greater inter- and intra-
occupational conflict and polarization between and within professional asso-
ciations and groups. They will become even more internally divided and strat-
ified between an elite group, working more intimately with governmental and
corporate elites, and a large group of technical specialists performing increas-
ingly routinized and standardized tasks. Indeed, some researchers (Leicht and
Fennel 2001) have gone as far as to suggest that elite managers are emerging
as the ‘new professionals’ within a radically reconfigured international expert
division of labour.