Introduction

What are our criteria for judging teachers, health care staff, social workers and those employed in the criminal justice system as ‘professional’ and what are the impacts of current changes and challenges on the nature of the ‘professional project’, where professionals need to become accountable to the interests of a changing public amid a growing background of tighter resources and demands for citizenship rights? There are several rich theoretical perspectives shaping professionalism as a concept, demonstrating that there is more than one valid view of a social action or a social phenomenon. However, most social scientists agree on some basic characteristics of professionals (see, for example, Rogers and Pilgrim, 2014: 108):

• • Professions are interest groups and engaged in competition with each other and other groups in society, up to and including the state.

• • Professionals are concerned with providing services to people rather than producing inanimate goods.

• • The social status of professionals tends to increase as a function of length of training required to practice.

• • Professions have a distinctive place in the class system, because their opportunities for income derive from their knowledge and qualifications and they claim a specialist knowledge about the service they provide.

At the heart of the ‘professional project’ is a belief that professionals need to strive both economically and socially. The services that professionals provide are characteristically different from the goods that are sold by a manufacturer or a retailer, in that they are intangible and the purchaser has to take them on trust (Macdonald, 1995). The growing number of people working in professional, managerial and administrative occupations has been related to the importance of large-scale public, private, voluntary and third sector organisations both in the United Kingdom (UK) and elsewhere. It has also been connected with the expanding numbers of people working in sectors of the economy where the state plays a major role – for example, in government, health and social welfare, education and criminal justice.

Main theoretical perspectives

The following represent examples of the main theoretical perspectives used as a basis for developing an analytical framework for understanding both the policy and practice dimensions relating to how professionals develop their identity. In this chapter and Chapter 5 different disciplinary-based perspectives are outlined briefly, for example from sociology, social policy, economics and management.