Management and organizational scholarship is overdue for a reappraisal of occupations and professions as well as a critical review of past and current work on the topic. Indeed, the field has largely failed to keep pace with the rising salience of occupational and professional (as opposed to organizational) dynamics in work life. Moreover, not only is there a dearth of studies that explicitly take occupational or professional categories into account, but there is also an absence of a shared analytical framework for understanding what occupations and professions entail. Our goal is therefore two-fold: first, to offer guidance to scholars less familiar with this terrain who encounter occupational or professional dynamics in their own inquiries and, second, to introduce a three-part framework for conceptualizing occupations and professions to help guide future inquiries. We suggest that occupations and professions can be understood through lenses of “becoming”, “doing”, and “relating”. We develop th...

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Three Lenses on Occupations and Professions in Organizations: Becoming, Doing, and Relating

Background: Professionalism is an important feature of the professional jobs. Dynamic nature and the various interpretations of this term lead to multiple defi nitions of this concept. The aim of this paper is to identify the core attributes of the nursing professionalism. Materials and Methods: We followed Rodgers’ evolutionary method of concept analysis. Texts published in scientifi c databases about nursing professionalism between 1980 and 2011 were assessed. After applying the selection criteria, the fi nal sample consisting of 4 books and 213 articles was selected, examined, and analyzed in depth. Two experts checked the process of analysis and monitored and reviewed them. Results: The analysis showed that nursing professionalism is determined by three attributes of cognitive, attitudinal, and psychomotor. In addition, the most important antecedents concepts were demographic, experiential, educational, environmental, and attitudinal factors. Conclusion: Nursing professionalism is an inevitable, complex, varied, and dynamic process. In this study, the importance, scope, and concept of professionalism in nursing, the concept of a beginning for further research and development, and expanding the nursing knowledge are explained and clarifi ed.

http://www.ijnmr.mui.ac.ir/index.php/ijnmr/article/viewFile/980/713

Nursing professionalism: An evolutionary concept analysis

Professions have traditionally been associated with a public safeguard role, with their superior ethical standards usually invoked to justify their occupational privileges and special labour market position. As such professionals have been thought to act as 'social trustees' (Brint, 1994) of key skills for the benefit of society as a whole or as 'gatekeepers' (Coffee, 2006) who play a fundamental role in maintaining the integrity of broader institutions. Yet recent scandals from Enron, to Parmalat and the recent financial crisis call into question the fiduciary role played by the professions. Thus, rather than as gatekeepers and social trustees, professions may have acted, perhaps unwittingly, as accomplices if not masterminds in recent episodes of corporate wrongdoing and malpractice. This chapter focuses on the role of professions in processes of malpractice and approaches this through the consideration of a number of key boundaries which frame professional practice and the tensions, conflicts and opportunities or temptations these generate. These include: 1) internal divisions within professional services firms between different services and the conflict of interests these may produce (thus the tensions between auditing and consulting within large accountancy firms), 2) the relationship between professional advisers and external stakeholders such as clients and increasingly financial investors, and the capture dynamics which may be at play here, 3) the boundaries which exist between different firms and professions engaged in gatekeeping functions and the systemic myopia that this allows and 4) the existence national and regional boundaries between jurisdictions with different standards of professional practice and regulatory oversight.

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Bad apples, bad barrels and bad cellars: a “boundaries” perspective on professional misconduct

Identity and Ministry in Healthcare Chaplaincy: The liminality of the Church of England priest who continues to sing the Lord’s song in the strange land of the National Health Service

Cette these analyse la co-evolution de deux secteurs dans la politique de la sante: sante publique (public health) et soins aux malades (health care). En d'autres termes, la relation entre les dimensions curative et preventive de la politique de la sante et leur developpement dans la duree. Une telle recherche est necessaire car les problemes de la sante sont complexes et ont besoin de solutions coordonnees. De plus, les depenses de la sante ont augmente sans arrt durant les dernieres decennies. Un moyen de reduire une future augmentation des depenses pourrait consister en davantage d'investissement dans des mesures preventives. En relation avec cette idee, ma recherche analyse les politiques de la sante publique et les soins aux malades de cinq pays: Allemagne, Angleterre, Australie, Etats-Unis et Suisse. En m'appuyant sur la litterature secondaire, des statistiques descriptives et des entretiens avec des experts et des politiciens, j'analyse la relation entre les deux secteurs depuis la fin du dix-neuvieme siecle. En particulier, je me focalise sur la relation des deux champs sur trois niveaux: institutions, acteurs et politiques. Mes resultats montrent les similitudes et les differences d'evolution entre les cinq pays. D'un c^ote, lorsque la profession medicale est politiquement active et que le pays consiste en une federation centralisee ou en un gouvernement unitaire, les deux secteurs sont integres au niveau institutionnel, ralliant les professions et groupes d'interet des deux secteurs la cause commune dans une activite politique. Par contre, dans tous les pays, les deux secteurs ont co-evolue vers une complementarite malgre de la politisation des professions et la centralisation du gouvernement. Ces resultats sont interessants pour la science politique en general car ils soulignent l'importance des professions pour le developpement institutionnel et proposent un cadre pour l'analyse de la co-evolution des politiques publiques en general.
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This Ph.D. thesis analyzes the co-evolution of the health care and the public health sectors. In other words, the relation between preventive and curative health policy and its evolution over time. Such research is necessary, because current health problems are complex and might need coordinated solutions. What is more, health expenditures have increased continuously in the last decades. One way to slow down further increase in health spending could be to invest more in preventative health policies. Therefore, I am connecting individual health care and public health into a common analysis, taking Australia, Germany, Switzerland, the UK and the U.S. as examples. Based on secondary literature, descriptive statistics and interviews with experts and policymakers, I am analyzing how the two sectors' relations co-evolved between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first century. Specifically, I am researching how health care and public health were related on the levels of institutions, actors and policies. My results show that there are differences and similarities in the co-evolution of policy sectors between these countries. On the one hand, when the medical profession was politically active and the country a centralized federation or a unitary state, there was institutional integration and common political advocacy of the sectors' interest groups and professions. On the other hand, in all countries, both sectors co-evolved towards complementarity, irrespectively of the politicization of professions and centralization of government. These findings are interesting for the political science literature at large, because they underline the importance of professions for institutional development and propose an analytical framework for analyzing the co-evolution of policy sectors in general.

https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_AFBDD85D94FC.P001/REF.pdf

Co-evolution of Policy Sectors: Health Care and Public Health in five Countries

Although it is still only a partly developed field of speciaUzed knowledge, the sociology of the professions is already too large a body of theoretical analysis and empirical research to be more than sketched in this paper. We shall therefore deal only with some of the central problems of the structure and functioning of the pro fessions; even then, for lack of space, we shall concentrate on the general aspects of six of these problems: (1) Social sources of con cern with the professions; (2) Toward a definition of the profes sions; (3) The role of the university professional school; (4) The emerging or marginal profession; (5) Professional roles and organi zational necessities; and (6) Professionals and poUtics. Although these six problems touch upon the essential characteristics of pro fessions in all societies, our illustrations are mostly from the United States, where the largest amount of empirical research on the pro fessions has been carried out. Despite essential similarities, there are major differences among professions in different societies and at different historical times, and a more complete treatment of the professions would have to specify these comparative social and historical differences.

Bernard Barber

Papers

Some Problems in the Sociology of the Professions