176 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
economic reward, enhanced social status, and extended work-based decision-
making discretion and autonomy—in the post-Second World War period
(Butler and Savage 1995; Crompton 1990; Goldthorpe 1982, 1995; Hanlon
2004; Larson 1977; Scott 1997). The rapid expansion of white-collar bureau-
cracies, in both the private and public sectors, during this period and the
expanded commercial opportunities that it provided to professional services
firms generated very favourable material, structural, and cultural conditions
in which professionalization flourished as a highly successful strategy of occu-
pational closure and control. The expansion of large-scale corporate bureau-
cracies, resulting from the growing concentration of private capital and the
centralization of public control from the 1930s onwards (Hanlon 2004),
provided the material and structural conditions in which elite service class
professional groups and managerial service class professional groups could
launch successfulmobility projectsaimed at institutionalizing their economic,
political, and social power.
The propertied elite and private sector-based professional (Savage et al.
1992) groups have always been in a relatively stronger position than their
public sector-based counterparts. The former have accumulated, monopo-
lized, and controlled liquid and transferable assets that are much more pow-
erful in their spatial reach and material impact than the more restricted
and immobile organizational assets available to public sector professional
and semi-professional groups (Savage et al. 1992). This latter group has also
experienced a steady decline in the power and influence of their ‘organiza-
tional assets’ as these have been further eroded through technological and
managerial rationalization. The ‘organizational professions’—predominantly
located in public sector-based or dependent agencies and organizations—are
in a much more exposed position when threatened with political, economic,
and cultural change potentially undermining their power base and the public
service ideology through which it has been legitimized (Clarke and Newman
1997).
Downsizing, delayering, decentralization, deregulation, and delegation
have become widespread throughout the private and public sectors during
the 1980s and 1990s. These changes have more often than not erodedprofes-
sionalizationas a strategy of occupational closure and control,professionalism
as a mechanism of work organization and management, andprofessionsas
the dominant source of expert culture and identity formation in a meri-
tocratic society (Dent and Whitehead 2002; Scarbrough 1996; Scarbrough
and Burrell 1996). The longer-term consequences for professional groups of
these exercises in institutional and organizational ‘creative destruction’ are
the subject of much debate and controversy ranging from ‘guarded opti-
mism’ (Ackroyd 1996; Brock, Powell, and Hinings 1999; Hanlon 2004; Kirk-
patrick, Ackroyd, and Walker 2005; Kitchener 2000; Leicht and Fennel 2002;
MacDonald 1995; Whittington, McNulty, and Whipp 1994) to ‘unrestrained