CHANGING PROFESSIONAL FORMS 187organizational management practically realizable mechanisms for dealing
with ‘control issues’ at a local level.
If, in Marx’s terms, capitalists eventually become their own grave-diggers,
then, in Foucauldian terms, the creators of the ‘disciplinary society’ eventually
become the agents of their own disempowerment. They design, implement,
and refine the very surveillance and control technologies that will be turned
back in on them by new expert groups working to very different political
agendas. As Rose (1999) has argued, advanced neo-liberal forms of govern-
ment, that depend on very different ‘governmental rationalities’ and control
technologies than their social democratic predecessors, have transformed the
governability of professional activity in ways that enclose them within far
more restricted and visible local sites of service delivery. These have further
exposed the inherent weaknesses of professional codes of conduct and modes
of professional self-governance that have traditionally buttressed orthodox
models of professional identity and status. Yet, many professional and semi-
professional groups have been complicit in this continuing process of demysti-
fication and de-institutionalization to the extent that they have played critical
roles in providing the innovative calculating and control technologies through
which they themselves are to be submitted to new regimes of accountability
and control. All they are left with is a now badly compromised, professional
morality and an increasingly restricted technical autonomy as a basis on which
to reconstruct and sustain some semblance of cultural authority and identity.
In a somewhat less apocalyptic register, Hanlon (2004: 205) concludes that,
though much has changed, ‘professional service markets and organizational
forms are still based on trust, homology, and reputational capital’. But he
also suggests that each of these key factors are having to readjust and to be
substantially renegotiated within a dynamic temporal and structural context
that challenges the institutional bedrock on which they have traditionally
rested. This process of radical readjustment will, as Rose and other ‘Fou-
cauldian governmentalists’ indicate, also require substantial changes to the
institutional context and organizational control regimes within and through
which professional service work is structured and legitimated. In turn, this is
likely to mean that the orthodox occupational identity formation associated
with the true professional will be increasingly subsumed, and consequently
further diluted and weakened, under the dominant global culture of con-
sumerism, individualism, and managerialism (Dent and Whitehead 2002: 1–
18). The gradual displacement, if not marginalization, of the once privileged
knowledges and practices of the old professional elites, also seems increasingly
probable. But their capacity to resist further incursions into their power base
and its legitimatory supports, even if this entails more internal restructuring
that divides and polarizes the controlling elites from the rank and file routine
workers, should not be underestimated. If something like this does happen,