Professions and Professional Service Firms

5 Professionalism as enterprise

Service class politics and the redefinition of professionalism (with Postscript: Extinguishing professionalism?)

Gerard Hanlon

Introduction

The changing nature of the class structure has largely been held responsible for the decline of Labour politics and the emergence of the New Right over the past decade. The thrust of this thesis is that the traditional working class, which was the bulwark of the labour movement both industrially and politically, has declined and been replaced by the service class in most of the advanced economies (see Lash and Urry 1987; Fox Piven 1991). Such a transition has altered the nature of politics because the service class is inherently conservative (Goldthorpe 1982). This thesis is ...