184 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Aronowitz and DiFazio (1994), Burris (1993), and Murphy (1990), contends
that professionals can be seen as ‘technical intellectuals’ who find themselves
in a situation where they are increasingly exposed to the rationalizing and
deskilling forces previously reserved for more routine white-collar occupa-
tions and workers. As a result, ‘real control’ (as opposed to ‘formal control’) of
the new, knowledge-based productive and administrative apparatus required
to manage advanced capitalist economies and welfare states passes from the
technical intelligentsia into the hands of the corporate and governmental elite.
The latter is supported by a transnational capitalist class of highly mobile
and specialized technical experts who provide the specialized knowledge and
control technologies required to keep the system going by satisfying the profit-
driven culture ideology of consumerism (Sklair 2001).
While identifying the immense pressure that the professions are under to
conform to the latest structural and organizational dictates of ‘the global
market’ or ‘international competitiveness’, the proletarianization thesis may
be guilty of oversimplifying both the process and outcomes of professional
change in advanced capitalist societies. Many of the underlying structures
and mechanisms that have generated and sustained professionalization and
professionalism since the eighteenth century cannot be properly accounted
for in this way.
Hanlon (1998) identifies a long-term process of ‘creeping commercializa-
tion’ in which the established professions are allowed to regain and retain
some semblance of legitimacy and autonomy, but only if they submit them-
selves to the new surveillance technologies and disciplinary regimes taking
root in the business and state apparatus. They are forced to renegotiate their
occupancy of and control over various jurisdictional domains in terms that
are more consistent with the ever-changing requirements of international
competition and the demand for more entrepreneurial forms of expert service
provision consistent with a ‘minimal state’. Thus, the established professions
are only able to maintain their economic and political power base, and the
cultural and symbolic capital that flows from it, if they drop the pretence to
generalized moral authority. They are forced to become much more politically
realistic about the ‘terms and conditions’ on which their, now much more
restricted, occupational exclusion and control will continue to be tolerated
and the wider implications of these newly imposed structural limitations for
their cultural authority and identity.
However, Hanlon’s analysis also raises further questions about the cognitive
and technical knowledge base on which conventional professional authority
and identity has rested. This analysis would suggest that the more this cogni-
tive and technical knowledge base is penetrated by ‘alien’ values, norms, and
practices, the weaker it is likely to become as an effective institutional protector
of established cultural authority and symbolic status.