Professions and Professional Service Firms

Postscript

Extinguishing professionalism?

Gerard Hanlon

It is roughly twenty years since the paper ‘Professionalism as enterprise: Service class politics and the redefinition of professionalism’ was published in Sociology (Hanlon 1998) and, unsurprisingly, much has altered. Although picked up in the broader sociology of professions literature, on re-reading the paper it feels very British. It was an attempt to examine the manner in which professional ideology chops and changes with wider social re-composition. It challenged the idea that professionals were simply trusted as members of the service class to argue that this ‘trust’ was always contingent on wider class struggles. Furthermore, it argued the issue of trust and social recomposition ...