CHANGING PROFESSIONAL FORMS 173Global corporate restructuring and the long-term effects of market-driven
government policies have forced professional associations and groups into a
more accommodating political stances towards extensive and intrusive audit-
ing and surveillance mechanisms.
Adapting to the political and economic realities of contemporary profes-
sional life within a political culture that is ideologically hostile to the norma-
tive authority and moral claims of the professional becomes the ‘ontological
priority’ for the majority of professional workers (Dent and Whithead 2002).
As a result, all pretence to the ‘natural’ moral and cultural authority that flows
from indeterminate professional cognitive, symbolic, and technical power
is washed away in the maelstrom of economic, technological, and political
transformation now coruscating through late-modern societies. This does not
necessarily entail the complete eradication of professionalism as, an always
contested, principle and terrain of work organization and control. Rather, as
Scarbrough (1996: 25) suggests, professionalism continues to evoke powerful
meanings and identities such that the ‘idea of professionalism’ is likely to
endure as an ideological resource for managers and expert groups.
Given the wider political and institutional context outlined above, the
purpose of this chapter is to review and evaluatethree very broad, ideal-type,
projections or models of possible ‘professional futures’ that draw on a wide range
of cultural values and structural mechanisms conventionally associated with
professionalism in modern industrial societies(Reed 2004). The first of these
ideal-typical prognostic models envisages something of a return to the halcyon
days of unchallenged professional authority and autonomy when, to invoke
Stalin yet again, the professions were trulyengineers of human souls.Veryfew,
if any, social scientists would wish to hold to this interpretation in its most
optimistic form. However, there are a number (Ackroyd 1996; Freidson 1994;
Kirkpatrick, Ackroyd, and Walker 2005; MacDonald 1995) who would suggest
that professionalism and professions will reassert themselves as the dominant
principle and form of organizing and controlling expert knowledge and skill
in the twenty-first century. The second vision is one offaceless technocrats
suggesting that, in so far as they have any sort of a future, the professions must
come to terms with the managerialist ideologies and technocratic practices
that now bestride contemporary work organizations in globalized capitalist
political economies. Only by flexibly adapting to these new realities, and the
power structures from which they have emerged and on which they continue
to depend, will the contemporary professions be able to survive in the ‘brave
new world’ of globalized markets for expert knowledge and skill and the
multinational corporate structures through which they are serviced (Brock,
Powell, and Hinings 1999; Cohen et al. 2003). Finally, a third prognosis will
be considered; one that rejects the naïve political optimism of the engineers of
human souls vision and the explicit technological determinism of the faceless
technocrats interpretation. This final vision of professional futures anticipates