Showing papers in "Current Sociology in 2011"

A new professionalism? Challenges and opportunities:

Abstract: Sociologists interested in professional work and occupations have differentiated professionalism as a distinctive and special way of controlling and organizing work and workers, with real advantage...

Professionals and field-level change: Institutional work and the professional project

Abstract: This article explicates the causal connections between changes in professional jurisdictions and changes in organizational fields. The authors argue that professional projects carry within them projects of institutionalization. They focus attention on the critical but often invisible role that professionals play in institutional work, or the creation, maintenance and transformation of institutions. The key contribution of this article is to explicate the professional project as an endogenous mechanism of institutional change. Based on a review of prior research on institutional change in which professionals play a central role, the authors observe four essential dynamics through which professionals reconfigure institutions and organizational fields. First, professionals use their expertise and legitimacy to challenge the incumbent order and to define a new, open and uncontested space. Second, professionals use their inherent social capital and skill to populate the field with new actors and new identities...

Introduction: Professions and organizations - a conceptual framework

Abstract: This collection seeks to reconnect two separate streams of work on professional organizations and professional occupations. In particular the articles collected here identify two key themes: (1) the challenges and opportunities that professional organizations pose for established and emerging professionalization projects and (2) the extent to which professional organizations create, institutionalize and manipulate new forms of professionalism and models of professionalization. To this effect, this collection brings together a number of articles from a broad range of disciplines (sociology, management, healthcare, accountancy, law and geography), theoretical backgrounds and national contexts which explore the complex connections between professional occupations and organizations.

Towards corporate professionalization: The case of project management, management consultancy and executive search

Abstract: This article explores patterns of professionalization in a number of ‘new’ knowledge-based occupations: management consultancy, project management and executive headhunters. Against a general assumption in the literature that such occupations are unwilling and/ or incapable to professionalize, this article suggests how a professionalization project has indeed been in play within these occupational domains. Perhaps most interestingly, these occupations are developing a new pattern of ‘corporate’ professionalization which departs in significant ways from established paths and which is more appropriate for the specific knowledge-bases, occupational characteristics and historical circumstances of these occupations. Using semi-structured interviews with key institutional protagonists, the analysis identifies some new features of corporate professionalization, which despite differences in occupational structure and history, are common to the three professions under review and which may be relevant to a broader range of knowledge-based occupations. These include: organizational membership, client engagement, competence-based closure and internationalization. The article then proceeds to compare and contrast these new professionalization strategies and tactics with the more traditional processes followed by the established professions. Corporate professionalization, it is then argued, may present the basis for a new pattern of collective mobility and for a new understanding of professionalism in the 21st century.

Childcare needs and childcare policies: A multidimensional issue:

Abstract: Childcare has become a much-debated issue in all developed countries. Who should care for children, how, how much and for how long are the questions at the centre of value conflicts that shape not only policies and struggles around policies, but also individual and family choices. This article contributes to the debate in two ways. First, it presents an up-to-date overview of the different childcare packages offered by the 27 EU countries, indicating how they represent quite different understandings of proper care, as well as of proper behaviour by mothers and fathers. Second, it attempts to unravel the different dimensions implicated in the debate, going beyond the simplification of the mother’s care vs non-family care dichotomy. It concludes that an integrated research agenda, focusing both on the outcomes for labour markets and for children’s well-being, is necessary in order to develop policies that address the complex issues of choice, rights and social inequality involved in child-caring patterns.

University systems in the Arab East: Publish globally and perish locally vs publish locally and perish globally:

Abstract: This article attempts to demonstrate how the university system and the system of social knowledge production greatly influence elite formation in the Arab East (in Egypt, Syria, the Palestinian territory, Jordan and Lebanon) by focusing on three intertwined factors: compartmentalization of scholarly activities, the demise of the university as a public sphere and the criteria for publication that count towards promotion. Universities have often produced compartmentalized elites inside each nation-state and they don’t communicate with one another: they are either elite that publish globally and perish locally or elite that publish locally and perish globally. The article pays special attention to elite universities.

Remaking professionals? How associations and professional education connect professionalism and organizations

Abstract: This article highlights connections between professional and organizational logics that might arise outside organizations, especially during professional education. Traditionally, many professional...

The impact of transnational migration on gender and marriage in sending communities of Vietnam

Abstract: The recent, rapid increase in cross-border marriages between women from Southeast Asia and men from East Asia is creating a new international migration flow of ‘marriage migrants’ in the region. Th...

Hollow from the start? Image professionalism in management consulting

Abstract: This article shows how over the course of more than a century management consulting firms have managed to create an image of professionalism in order to both gain external legitimacy with their cli...

Professions, organizations and the state: Applying the sociology of the professions to the case of management consultancy:

Abstract: In the recent literature on knowledge-based occupations it is frequently noted that some groups, such as management consultants, have been far less successful than others in developing a system of professional regulation and organization. This is generally attributed to the functional characteristics of their knowledge base, which is too elusive, fuzzy and perishable to sustain traditional professionalization projects. It is also suggested that these groups have little interest in becoming professions and have relied instead on alternative occupational strategies. In this article, drawing on a range of secondary sources, the authors highlight certain limitations of this account and offer an alternative. Focusing on the historical development of professional associations in the context of management consulting in the UK, the authors illustrate the role played by the state and large firms in undermining efforts to professionalize. A key contribution of the article is to highlight the need for a more inclusi...

Making sense of career in a Big Four accounting firm

Abstract: There is little existing research on how managers within the ‘Big Four’ professional services firms (PSFs) respond to the increasing normative pressures and performative cultures that characterize contemporary PSFs. It is primarily managers within PSFs that enact the new managerial roles, systems and ethos that differentiate ‘managed professional businesses’ (MPBs) from the P2 archetype. It is managers who in their own estimation need to ensure that both organization and employees perform to the required standard. This article reports from an empirical study into one of the Big Four accounting firms. The focus is on how a specific group of employees, namely female managers, make sense of career and performance in their particular organization. The respondents’ career is being shaped by their real and perceived willingness to be ‘bothered to be playing the game’ as well as providing a good client service and participating in the ongoing rationalization of professional practices. Thus, the self is divided: ...

Cosmopolitanism, the clash of civilizations and multiple modernities:

Abstract: The article examines the three alternative conceptions of the emerging global order with special reference to the place and role of the world religions in that order. (1) Cosmopolitanism builds upo...

The contested terrain of hospital management: Professional projects and healthcare reforms in Denmark:

Abstract: Although much has been written on the changing management of professional services organizations, only limited attention has been given to the way in which management itself might represent a contested terrain. Drawing on concepts from the sociology of professions, this article develops this idea in relation to the Danish hospital sector. The analysis of secondary sources reveals how, from the mid-1980s, both the nursing and medical professions in Denmark actively sought to lay claim to the jurisdiction of hospital management. The result of this struggle was to further reinforce the dominant position of doctors in the clinical division of labour although the position of nurses has also been enhanced. Such findings point to the need to give more attention to the way broader changes in hospital governance are mediated by interprofessional struggles and rivalries. Such struggles, in turn, have implications not only for the division of labour and status order between professions but also for the way management work itself is enacted.

The re-landscaping of the legal profession: Large law firms and professional re-regulation:

Abstract: The size and scope of global law firms has made them difficult to encompass within a single regulatory jurisdiction. As the UK government sought to take control of the legal profession and market by removing self-regulation and introducing external regulation under the Legal Services Act, the large law firms were able to countermand the new regime. Through a combination of associations like CityUK, the City of London Law Society, as well as through individual firms, large law firms lobbied successfully to reinstate a new form of self-regulation known as AIR. The elites of the legal profession constructed a new logic of professionalism that accorded with the firms’ ideologies and government’s market-oriented objectives. Further attempts to consolidate their position at the EU and at the GATS levels are still in negotiation. Despite the legal market shifting to a more diffuse combination of actors, of which lawyers are only a segment, elite law firms have apparently strengthened their hold.

Deprofessionalization of a female occupation: Challenges for the sociology of professions

Abstract: This article argues that Norwegian public health nurses, after a long period of professionalization, have recently undergone a process of deprofessionalization. Public health nurses’ jurisdiction has become heavily circumscribed. They have lost duties linked with power and respect in the local community and they have lost monopoly on duties originally ascribed to the profession. Despite these changes, this study indicates a conspicuous lack of open disputes, conflicts or demands centred on jurisdiction and jurisdictional claims. In other words, the manner in which public health nurses cope with recent changes in their job structure does not seem to follow an easily explainable pattern in terms of prevailing sociological theories on professions. It is argued that the sociology of professions needs to develop theories that can explain why deprofessionalization sometimes occurs without resistance.

Race, attitudes and behaviour in racially-mixed, low-income neighbourhoods in Cape Town, South Africa:

Abstract: The end of apartheid in South Africa has not led to widespread racial desegregation and racial integration. Racial segregation and antipathy appear to have deep and enduring roots. There has been s...

The rationalization of civil society

Abstract: Two ideas are almost universally accepted as reality in political sociology. One is that numbers are declining in nearly all membership associations. The usual interpretation of this phenomenon is that it occurs because of individualization. The other is that the character of collective action has changed. This idea, which stems from Touraine, Melucci and Castells, states that a new historical category of social action has emerged, one that resembles action in primary groups rather than in organizations and in some way is a victory over the iron law of oligarchy. This article questions both ideas. The author intends to show that another historical process is in play here, namely, a process of ‘inert rationalization’ in social movements, political parties and associations, which is taking place in Europe with different starting points and at different tempos. The result of this process can be summed up as ‘more organization with fewer people’. Domination, inherent in oligarchic organizations, is being transformed by the creation of a new organizational boundary between elite (or profession) and members. The point is that it is membership itself as a form for affiliation that is disappearing, not just members. The article argues that this is mainly because resource mobilization patterns have historically changed from the mobilization of resources drawn from members to the mobilization of resources drawn from other organizations. Finally, the article analyses the importance of the unstructured power fields (or open spaces) created by rationalization processes for social innovation and new social movements.

Sinking under the weight of corruption: Neoliberal reform, political accountability and justice

Abstract: The United Nations adopted the 2003 Convention Against Corruption to reduce corruption in developing nations. Corruption's determinants include political systems' permeability to economic influence, state economic intervention, weak political competition and officials' discretionary power to allocate resources. Corruption's outcomes are slowed economic development, misallocation of government resources, income inequalities and, less frequently, disasters. Using archival and interview data, this article documents corruption's shaping of the 2006 sinking of an Egyptian ferry in the Red Sea, which killed 1034; high-level corruption not only caused the disaster but exacerbated its impacts. The study's findings confirm much of the empirical literature but contradict assertions that corruption is associated with high levels of government intervention in the economy. Based on the findings, the article gives a critique of neoliberal reform that associates it with high-level corruption.

Creolization, colonial citizenship(s) and degeneracy: A critique of selected histories of Sierra Leone and South Africa:

Abstract: This work examines the nexus between creolization, colonial citizenship(s) and discourses of degeneration. It focuses on two sites: (1) 19th- and 20th-century Freetown, Sierra Leone, and (2) the early Cape and 20th-century South Africa. The author engages three key thinkers: Edouard Glissant, Jean-Loup Amselle and Mahmood Mamdani to illustrate how these colonial administrations deployed creolization to construct partial citizenships derived from ideas of ‘mixed race’ and ‘corrupted’ or ‘lacking’ culture. The author argues that ‘Creole’ and ‘creole’ signified, in the colonial imagination, a ‘degenerate type’ behind its legal category, ‘non-native’, and shows how uses of the concepts ‘creolization’ and ‘creole’, in selected histories of the Cape and Freetown, surrender to their colonial meanings, obscure their biopolitical significance and so, collude with discourses of degeneration. The article concludes first, that Edouard Glissant’s conception of creolization as method counters ethnological reasoning and...

Beyond the Mandela decade: The ethic of reconciliation?

Abstract: The author claims that there is an emergent ethic of reconciliation which influences social and political action in the recent period. This ethic of reconciliation has four sources: neo-Gandhian di...

Social-emotional world: Mapping a continent:

Abstract: This article describes two basic aspects of the social-emotional world: degree of connectedness (solidarity/alienation) and six specific emotions. This field needs to be clarified, because of the use of vernacular words rather than clearly defined concepts. Two sets of definitions are proposed. The first involves conceptual and operational definitions of degree of connectedness. The second offers a preliminary taxonomy of six emotion concepts. The connectedness formulation establishes an alienation/solidarity axis with three points between complete solidarity and complete alienation. Studies of pluralistic ignorance and false consensus, drama theory and other applications fall somewhere in the middle of this axis. The emotions taxonomy can be a first step toward better understanding their role in social life and their relation to connectedness. The theory implied by these definitions can be viewed as a first step toward a map of the social-emotional world.

Values and culture in the social shaping of the future

Abstract: This article introduces the Current Sociology monograph issue on Values and Culture. It discusses sociology’s renewed interest in values and the general approach on which the contributors converge despite diverse theoretical backgrounds, areas of focus and social settings. It explains how the studies in this publication contribute to the understanding of the formation and operation of values on micro, meso and macro levels in an increasingly globalized world.

Perceptions of labour market risks: Shifts and continuities across generations

Abstract: In the risk society thesis, most notably forwarded by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, the labour market plays a key role in individualization processes. While for previous generations, family and personal networks, and also government institutions, were important in providing access to and mobility within the labour market, cohorts entering the labour market since the 1970s and onwards are perceived to be living in a modern ‘risk regime’, requiring each individual to make choices and decisions in relation to a market that no longer accommodates employment based on kinship and friendship. Based on data from 58 qualitative interviews with parents and their adult children, this article examines more closely these purported changes. The study’s main observation is that important changes towards increased perceived individualization have taken place from one generation to the next. While affirming the disjuncture posited by Beck between a ‘collectivized past’ and an ‘individualized present’, this study’s empi...

Value, politics and democracy in the United States

Abstract: This article examines the role of values in the political discourse of the last decade in the US. It embarks from what many observers had described as a puzzle: the fact that significant parts of t...

Advertising and value formation: The power of multinational companies:

Abstract: Contemporary advertising images in the media play an important role in promoting and sustaining contemporary consumer culture and provide one of the pillars upholding and furthering contemporary capitalism. Though one of its key roles is to promote materialism, advertising imagery also plays a role in cultural and value change at both the surface, selling products, and structural levels, causing shifts in cultural values such as an increasing emphasis on self-gratification through consumption, acceptance of increasing use of sexuality to sell products, obsession with youth, appearance and body image, and overwhelming obsession with modernity and the latest technology. There needs to be greater acknowledgement of these processes or the probable future will be an intensification of the present unsustainable economic system. Preferable options for the future need to take cognizance of the powerful role advertising and the media play in society and assess the possible options for changing those roles.

Societal value formation and the value of life

Abstract: This article explores the formation of values on individual, cultural, societal, civilizational and epochal levels and discusses the carriers of values, symbolic hierarchies and future prospects. It demonstrates the continued conceptual and time-diagnostic usefulness of Georg Simmel’s sociological approach to values and argues that his Lebensphilosophie (‘philosophy of life’) offers a platform for dealing with modernity’s contingencies and ambiguities by treating life as such as the ultimate but indeterminate value that must be worked out by individuals. Values are needed as a preliminary means of orientation, even if these need not be considered to be of lasting duration.

Values and the conditions of global communication

Abstract: This article examines the role of values in the shaping of futures from the perspective of global communication. It argues that the prospects for a democratic world society depend on the creation o...

Thinking Goudge: Fatal child abuse and the problem of uncertainty

Abstract: The increased valuation of children’s lives characteristic of modern society emphasizes the problem of child abuse. Beginning in the 1960s, increased public awareness of child abuse led to increased attention to the professions concerned with child homicide. This attention has taken the form of inquiries into children’s deaths that historically concentrated on social work ‘error’. Recent inquiries have expanded their attention to other professions, particularly the medical and policing professions. Ontario’s Goudge Inquiry centred on paediatric forensic pathology but, rather than focusing concern on murdered children, considered the moral hazard of wrongful convictions stemming from an overzealous concern with child abuse. The inquiry thus raises the problem of what evidence is certain, and how this certainty is evaluated. In turn, this makes the risk of child abuse reflexive insofar as under conditions of uncertainty professional medical judgement contains reflexive risk conditions. Because of these reflexive conditions, professional willingness to engage in child protection is being undermined and therefore threatens to paralyse the larger child protection project.

Transnational injustice symbols and communities: The case of al-Qaeda and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp

Abstract: The article identifies a political-cultural deficit in the expansive literature of the last 10–15 years on transnational activist communication. To illustrate the utility of a political-cultural sociological approach the article discusses how contemporary jihadist activists, and especially al-Qaeda, have actively transformed the Guantanamo Bay detention camp set up by the United States following the attacks of 9/11 into a transnational injustice symbol. Transnational injustice symbols are events and situations (both past and present) constructed and employed by political actors to condense and perform perceived injustices before geographically, socially and culturally dispersed audiences. Guantanamo Bay and other injustice symbols such as Palestine, Abu Ghraib and the Muhammad cartoons published in Denmark in 2005 are key elements in the creation of a transnational jihadist injustice community.

‘Fear of numbers’: Reflections on the South African case

Abstract: Arjun Appadurai’s The Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006) draws largely on the case of India for empirical data. The ‘fear of small numbers’ that he discusses relates t...