CHANGING PROFESSIONAL FORMS 179repository of moral authority, social wisdom, and technical proficiency, would
not be easy. Once the naturally given authority to exercise judgemental
autonomy, and the ‘moral mysteries’ in which this technical or operational
power was traditionally surrounded, become increasingly exposed to and
invaded by ‘the market’ or by those acting as its delegated agents, then
sustaining professional claims to elite status and rewards is much more
problematic.
Recently, Hodges (2000: 175–8) has argued that the ‘politics of expert
power and reward’ in advanced capitalist political economies will revolve
around group struggles to access and control sources of relative labour market
advantage in distinctive jurisdictional sectors or domains within an increas-
ingly demystified and delegitimated professional state. This analysis of an
increasingly structurally fragmented and politically fractured ‘professional
class’ operating within a highly complex contemporary division of expert
labour in which specialist knowledge is increasingly becoming deregulated,
demystified, and delegitimated is also reflected in Stehr (1994) and Leicht
and Fennel (2001). Stehr (1994) contends that the dynamic of technological,
economic, and cultural change relentlessly restructuring ‘knowledge bearing
and disseminating occupations’ is generating a proliferation of occupational
groups and organizational practices geared to producing, packaging, and
applying specialist knowledge and skill in ways that do not, and cannot,
conform to established professional forms and norms. The ‘new’ or ‘entre-
preneurial professions’ are emerging as the key producers, interpreters, and
mediators of specialist knowledge and skill outside the purview and control
of the institutionalized jurisdictional work domains in which the ‘liberal
professions’ have fashioned their power base. In time, it is extremely likely
that the entrepreneurial professions will make significant incursions into the
jurisdictional work domains of the liberal professions as they move to extend
their technical reach and political influence within a globalized market for
expert services.
Stehr’s analysis is echoed in Leicht and Fennell’s identification (2001) of
the ‘neo-entrepreneurial workplace’ as the emerging institutional setting and
organizational locale within which the changing balance of expert power and
control has been developing over the last two decades. They see this, flatter,
more flexible, porous, post-unionized, and virtualized, organizational form
as being based on the logic of coordination and control radically at odds
with the core structural principles and cultural norms of the established
liberal professions. Thus, they see the role of middle-level management as
almost completely disappearing, while the ‘professional’ power, authority, and
prestige of top and senior level corporate management, particularly, but not
only, within the private, for-profit sector being considerably strengthened and
extended. The latter are increasingly seen, and see themselves, as ‘on par with
physicians and lawyers in their ability to establish and maintain independent,