CHANGING PROFESSIONAL FORMS 185Surveillance and disciplinary regimes
If the symbiotic link between ‘knowledge/power’ is broken, or at the very
least eroded and diluted, by economic, political, and ideological forces that
increasingly regard professionalism as a major obstacle to necessary social and
cultural change, then the need for a thorough ‘identity make-over’ becomes
very pressing indeed. This intimate ‘knowledge/power’ relation, and its crucial
implications for professional identity formation, needs to be located in a
longer-term historical context in order that the more recent ‘crisis in profes-
sionalism’ can be properly analysed and evaluated.
As Foucault (2003) argued, the emergence and subsequent development
of what he calls ‘disciplinary or non-sovereign power’, as a primary mecha-
nism or structure of social control and organizational surveillance, was closely
aligned to the rise of the medical and human sciences and their associated
expert or ‘professional’ groups from the eighteenth century onwards. This
new mechanism of power and control was applied primarily to bodies and
the temporal sequences and social spaces through which they moved and
developed. It required constant, rather than discontinuous, surveillance. This,
in turn, ‘presupposed a closely meshed grid of material coercions rather than
the physical presence of a sovereign, and it therefore declined a new economy
of power based on the principle that there had to be an increase both in the
subjugated forces and in the force and efficacy of that which subjugated them’
(Foucault 2003: 36).
The expert groups and professional associations that crystallized around
this new economy of disciplinary power were bound up with the expansion of
professionalized scientific and technological knowledge. The latter provided
the necessary theoretical and technical means that disciplinary power required
to sustain itself and gradually to expand into all areas of biological and
social life in modern societies. What we have here is an alternative historical
and analytical narrative of the emergence, development, and domination of
professional power and control. Now this story is told from the standpoint
of the ‘delicate mechanisms and instruments’ through which professional
power and control are achieved, rather than the overarching ideologies of
rationality, truth, and service from which the ‘professional story’ is normally
narrated.
The Foucauldian narrative of professional power and control seems increas-
ingly apposite in a contemporary historical and social context that is radically
subversive of the ‘official’ story of professionalization and professionalism
(Gane and Johnson 1993; Johnson 1993). It is a story that is now ‘told from
below’ rather than ‘from above’. From the point of view of the detailed and
delicate mechanisms of exclusion and surveillance that were put in place
as ‘micromechanisms of power’ by professional groups acting as the agents