Professions and Professional Service Firms

6 Enterprise, hybrid professionalism and the public sector

Mirko Noordegraaf

Introduction

The public sector is highly dependent upon professions, professionals and professional work. Medical doctors, nurses, police, public persecutors, judges, teachers, social workers – they all provide essential public services, which implies treating individual cases (such as patients, pupils or criminals) in the light of public objectives and formalised policy programmes. Public professionals, in other words, treat cases in order to serve generic public or societal ambitions – such as public health and safety – as well as more specific policy programmes that have been formally agreed upon in order to realise such ambitions.

In that sense, public professionalism ...