186 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
of social order and control within an economically and politically unstable
socio-historical context. It is a story that is told from the point of view of
‘the subjugated’; that is, from the perspective of those subjected to these new
surveillance and control mechanisms as they became economically profitable
and politically useful to dominant elites and classes. It is a story that strips
bare the moral rhetorics and intellectual discourses that have surrounded and
mystified professionalization to show them for what they really are—that is, as
discursive practices and technical instruments that operationalize and obscure
‘the material agency of subjugation’ (Foucault 2003: 28).
Professionalization is now redefined as a socio-historical process and orga-
nizational form that comes into play at the lowest levels of society and the
key role that it fulfils in normalizing those who present an imminent or
potential danger to ‘normal society’. It is reworked as a practical discursive
matrix and tool geared to the fabrication and implementation of new forms
of power and control in newly ‘professionalized’ organizational settings such
as asylums, schools, clinics, and prisons. Professionals now become the new
merchants of morality at an historical juncture and within a social con-
text in which moral and political realism is at a premium. Those to whom
they minister (‘the subjugated’) are now seen as active agents in their own
self-management and control. But they routinely resist, in some form or
another, the new surveillance and disciplinary technologies to which they are
subjected.
Over the last ten years or so a ‘Foucualdian school’ of ‘professional studies’
has emerged that has provided very different accounts and analyses of the
rise, power, and position of expert groups within modern societies to those
provided by mainstream sociologists and historians. These studies encom-
pass both the ‘old, established professions’ of medicine, law, architecture,
and accountancy, as well as the ‘new, emergent professions’ of criminology,
psychology and psychiatry, social work, nursing, and management (Dean
1999; Dent and Whitehead 2002; Du Gay and Salaman 1992; Gane and
Johnson 1993; Garland 1990; Grey 1999; Halford and Leonard 1999; Knights
and McCabe 2003; Miller and Rose 1990; Power 1997; Rose 1990, 1991,
1996, 1999; Scarbrough and Burrell 1996; Thrift 1999, 2002; Townley 1994).
They ‘demystify’ professional knowledge and the power that emerges from
it, but not in any classical neo-Marxist critique of professional ‘false con-
sciousness’. Instead, they follow Foucault’s original example of tracing and
mapping the multifarious ways in which ‘professional knowledge’ becomes
operationalized in detailed procedures, instruments, techniques, and prac-
tices within a wide range of organizational settings dealing with human
beings and their problems as their raw material. They focus on the indis-
pensable role that professionals play in providing the theories, programmes,
and technologies that make modern forms of institutional governance and