Reconfiguring Professional Work: Changing Forms of Professionalism in Public Services

Many public services are produced by professional workers who deal with cases and clients on the basis of professional knowledge and skills. As groups of workers, they acquired autonomies to structure professional knowledge and skills and to regulate case treatment. During the previous years, professional work has changed. Most often, the “new public management” is seen as the main driver: Service provision is said to be managerialized to make services more efficient and effective. This article rejects this simple explanation and argues that public professional work is affected by much more than managerial reform. It presents an analytical framework for tracing broader societal forces that reconfigure professional work. Professionals are not merely managed and measured; professional work in public services might be (a) reorganized, (b) restratified, and (c) relocated. Increasingly fragmented and dependent professional fields might have to seek new forms of control and new understandings of public professionalism are required.