CHANGING PROFESSIONAL FORMS 175as a configuration of collective responses to deeper, underlying structural
movements that have confronted established professional groups with inten-
sifying force and constraint since the early 1980s.
Five major structural movements can be identified. First, the global reach
and impact of a revived neo-liberal ideology that generated a series of highly
complex waves ofstate-initiatedprogrammes of marketization and deregu-
lation throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Frank 2000; Harvey 2003). Second,
a continuing ‘information and communication technology revolution’ and
the shift towards institutional and managerial governance through markets
and networks, rather than through hierarchies, that this generated (Castells
1996, 2000; Thompson 2003a; van Dijk 1999; Webster 2002). Third, the
move towards a highly individualized and consumption-dominated culture in
which collectivist and production-based occupational cultures and organiza-
tional identities becomes much weaker and difficult to sustain (Alvesson and
Willmott 2002; Giddens 1990, 2000). Fourth, the emergence of a globalized,
‘post-industrial’ political economy that is dominated by the provision of ser-
vices, rather than the manufacture of products, and the much more complex
‘knowledge-intensive’ forms of work organization and openly contested and
fragmented ‘expert-based’ occupational niche labour markets that this gener-
ates (Freidson 2001; Heckscher and Donnellon 1994; Lash and Urry 1994).
Finally, the expanding influence of ‘managerialism’, in all its multifarious
forms, as the dominant policy paradigm informing both private- and public-
sector restructuring and the new surveillance and control technologies that
it promotes (Enteman 1993; Exworthy and Halford 1999; Gabriel and Sturdy
2002; Reed 1999, 2002).
Of course, the precise nature, dynamics, interconnections, and conse-
quences of these putative structural changes are hotly contested within the
social science community and beyond (Jessop 2002; Thompson 2003b). Pro-
fessionalization, professionalism, and professions face a series of threats, as
well as opportunities, that question the underlying ‘rules of the game’ shaping
the development of professionalized institutional forms and organizational
structures for more than a century (Hanlon 2004). The collective capacity to
achieve and sustain effective monopoly control over specialized knowledge
and expert skill, as well as over the jurisdictional work domains in which
they are exercised, has been substantially weakened. Thus, the incipient politi-
cal, organizational, and ethical crisis that the established ‘liberal-independent
professions’ are facing can, in very broad terms, be explained as a gradual
‘draining away’ of material, cultural, and moral capital consequent on the
decline in elite and state support and the much more openly contested and
fragmented ‘system of professions’ that this has produced.
Professionalization was the dominant strategy and process of occupa-
tional closure and control that most ‘service class-based’ occupational groups
depended on to realize their ‘mobility projects’—that is for improved