188 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
then the possibilities for creating and sustaining a strong or high ‘trust culture’
(Misztal 2002) within the professions and between them and the wider general
public may become very limited indeed.
Conclusion
This chapter has provided a very broad overview and evaluation of the chal-
lenge that ‘disjunctive change’—that is, deep-seated, system-wide structural
transformations in the established institutional and ideological landscape—
presents to the professions and the occupational structures and organiza-
tional strategies through which they generate and sustain socio-economic
and political power. It has also considered the ways in which the profes-
sions have responded to this mounting challenge to their dominant position
within the expert division of labour and the longer-term implications of
these responses for established occupational identities and forms. Overall,
the chapter has suggested that the more apocalyptic projections of ‘profes-
sional meltdown’, as conveyed in the proletarianization thesis, are unlikely
to be realized. The triptych of professionalization, professionalism, and pro-
fessions, it has been argued, retains structural power and cultural capital, as
well as inherent organizational flexibility and adaptability, sufficient to resist
the radical form of deprofessionalization projected in the proletarianization
thesis.
Nevertheless, the chapter has indicated that a somewhat more contained,
deprofessionalizing dynamic is at work within a number of Anglo-American
political economies and welfare systems that is presenting a very substantial
threat to established professional power and authority. There are clear signs of
a partial convergence between macro-level structural and ideological trans-
formation, meso-level occupational and organizational restructuring, and
micro-level technical and discursive innovation sufficient to weaken the third
logic of work organization and occupational association in advanced capitalist
societies. This weakening or undermining of professionalism as the third logic
also has deleterious consequences for established professional identity and
the dominant cultural frameworks and discursive forms through which it is
legitimated and communicated. From the established professions’ collective
viewpoint, they seem to be ‘turning in on themselves’. As the pressure to
become more open, transparent, competitive, entrepreneurial, and merito-
cratic intensifies, so intra-occupational fragmentation and inter-occupational
polarization increases and begins to eat into the very ideological and intel-
lectual muscle on which the social cohesion and organizational power of the
system of professions depended.