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Challenging Dualism: Public Professionalism in ‘Troubled’Times

University of Warwick, d.gleeson{at}warwick.ac.uk

David Knights

University of Keele, d.knights{at}mngt@keele.ac.uk

In recent decades neo-liberal reform has significantly impacted on public sector professionals. Sociological interest in such impact has tended to focus on professionals as subjects of such reform: as either de-professionalized ‘victims’ who feel oppressed by the structures of control or strategic operators seeking to contest the spaces and contradictions of market, managerial and audit cultures. Such a dualism is reflective of wider separations of agency and structure that have plagued sociology down the years. Our approach challenges modernizing agendas which seek to re-professionalize or empower professionals without examining the changing conditions of their work or the neo-liberal conditions which frame their practice. It also questions the policy outcomes of reconciling the dualism between agency and structure through a ‘third way’ politics that purports to remove the tensions and conflicts between professions and various stakeholders, the private and the public, and markets and civic society.

Key Words: dualism • professionalism • public

Sociology, Vol. 40, No. 2, 277-295 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0038038506062033


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