180 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
fee-for-service practice delivery to corporate clients’ (Leicht and Fennell 2001:
81). They further extend this analysis by suggesting that managerial and pro-
fessional work, and the occupational interest groups clustering around these
jurisdictional domains, may be ‘changing places’.
The ‘professional project’ has been driven by the attempt to carve out and
defend work-based decision-making domains against actual and potential
competitors, while simultaneously seeking the support of the state and other
key institutional actors and stakeholder agencies in order to legitimate and
regulate (‘at a distance’) the material and cultural rewards that it delivers. On
the other hand, ‘the managerial project’ has been focused on securing absolute
social and organizational control over the material and HR that are required
in order to maximize shareholder returns in the private sector and to meet
public accountability norms as they are determined by the political party in
power at a particular point in time.
In the post-Second World War period, roughly speaking mid-1940s to the
late 1970s/early 1980s, a negotiated bargain or contract was struck between the
professional and managerial projects that ensured, an often somewhat uneasy
but relatively stable, collective deal that successfully contained the endemic
contradictions and conflicts between them. But, Leicht and Fennell (2001)
maintain, this contract or deal has been slowly but surely coming apart at
the seams over the last two decades. A series of neo-liberal inclined govern-
mental administrations, backed by their ideological and political supporters
in private sector multinational corporations (particularly those in the cultural
and media industries), have incrementally undertaken a series of strategic
policy changes detrimental to the professional project. They have substan-
tially increased the power, authority, and control of private and public sector-
based managerial elites at the expense of the established liberal professions.
Institutional reconfiguration and collective intent have been combined in an
innovative, but potentially destructive, package of reforms for the republic of
experts. Macdonald (1995), a highly sceptical evaluator of the ‘deprofession-
alization thesis’, analyses this mounting threat to professional cognitive, and
hence cultural-cum-political, exclusivity as testing the capacity of such groups
to annexe and retain professional knowledge.
It is this, socially and politically pivotal, ‘cultural work’ that seems to
be most under threat from the conjuncture of structural, cyclical, and
policy changes that have been reviewed in previous discussion. Much of
this literature has a strong ‘Anglo-American’ quality to it—that may be
in need of considerable qualification when relocated within a continental
European context. But, at the very least, it raises a series of fundamental
questions over the ‘social engineering’ occupational ideology and identity
that has underpinned the professionalization project’s dominant strategy
and form for institutionalizing the provision of expert services in the post-
1945 era.