178 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
sustained in an economic, social, and political environment dominated by
unregulated market competition, unrestrained consumerism, and rampant
individualism?
Engineers of human souls
The idea that modern day professionals constitute a ‘republic of experts’ who
benignlyexercise their technical power and social authority on behalf of the
collective good of society and the individual well-being of its citizens has
exerted a powerful cultural and political hold over the historical develop-
ment and structural formation of professionalism (Hodges 2000; Marquand
2004). Indeed, from Saint-Simon to Daniel Bell and on to Manuel Castells,
modern social theory and analysis has played a major intellectual and ide-
ological role in identifying and celebrating the rise of a professional elite
cadre, and its supporting cast of scientific, technical, and managerial middle-
level under-labourers, as one of the, if not the, ‘axial’ institutional features of
industrial and post-industrial society (Bell 1973, 1999; Castells 1996, 2002;
Wolin 1960, 2004). This broadly based ‘service class’ of professional, scien-
tific, technical, and managerial expert labour, with all its internal structural
contradictions and ideological tensions, has been the focus for both the party-
political and wider socio-political power struggles and competition within the
social democratic state that emerged out of the Second World War. Thus,
the post-1945 ‘social democratic contract or settlement’ between capital,
labour, and the state gave a critical role to formally autonomous professional
occupational associations and organizations in return for their, admittedly
grudging, acceptance of a limited degree of social regulation and adminis-
trative control (Clarke and Newman 1997; Hodges 2000; Leicht and Fennel
2001).
The service class of professionals, managers, and technicians within
industrial/post-industrial capitalist societies has always been stratified along
economic, technical, and cultural lines. But the divisions and tensions that
this inevitably generates have become more marked and potentially destabi-
lizing as the underlying dynamic and trajectory of contemporary structural
change further fragments and polarizes the collective interests and values
of various expert groups differentially located within the emergent expert
division of labour. Thus, the intimate historical and structural link between
expert ‘knowledge’ and power, that has so powerfully shaped the social and
organizational development of the modern professions becomes potentially
disabling. Repairing and sustaining institutionalized trust in professional-
ism, within a social and historical context that is endemically suspicious
of, indeed downright hostile to, the republic of experts as an irreplaceable