CHANGING PROFESSIONAL FORMS 183by globalized and deregulated markets in which the intensified competition
between expert groups reduces the risk of monopolization and exclusion.
This scenario takes us a long way from the revival of the liberal progressive
model of professional identity and role envisaged by Marquand and other
commentators working in the social democratic tradition. It also undermines
the technocratic vision of professional power and authority residing in unchal-
lenged expert knowledge and skill that provides the cognitive and ideological
basis for exclusive control over defined jurisdictional domains and the mater-
ial and symbolic rewards that it conveys. Instead, the consumer choice-driven
regime of expert service provision and organization envisages a future in
which traditional professional authority and identity is gradually superseded
by a much more ‘flexible’ and ‘adaptable’ model of professionalism, and, by
logical extension, professionalization, in which issues of trust and control are
left to market forces.
Merchants of morality
By the time we reach the third and final vision of professional futures sur-
veyed in this chapter, we have reached a point where much of the his-
torical, analytical, and ideological baggage that conventionally accompanied
the study of professionalization, professionalism, and professions may need
to be jettisoned. However, even in its darkest hour, mainstream studies of
professionalism have assumed that professional structures and systems will
adapt to whatever challenges are thrown at them (Ackroyd 1996; Freidson
1994; Kirkpatrick, Ackroyd, and Walker 2005; Macdonald 1995). As recently
as 1990, Derber, Schwartz, and Magrass confidently predicted that profes-
sionals would not become proletarianized in the same way as assembly line
operatives, craft workers, and even white-collar clerical, administrative, and
middle-managerial staff. Indeed, they insisted that professionals have carved
out a unique niche in the division of labour overseeing remarkable fiefdoms
of capital and knowledge.
While highly critical of the ‘mandarin class power and status’ aspirations
of modern professionals, Derber, Schwartz, and Magrass were convinced that
they could more than hold their own in the much more competitive and
fragmented socio-economic structures taking shape at the end of the twentieth
century. However, that underlying confidence in the durability and continuity
of established professional occupational strategies and forms may need to be
revised, or at the very least revisited, at a time when the challenge and threat
to their long-term viability seems to be at its zenith. ‘Proletarianization’, as the
most radical and fundamental form of de-professionalization, is not the only
game in town. The ‘proletarianization thesis’ as advocated most recently by