General introduction: The changing world of professions and professionalism

This chapter focuses on the societal embeddedness of professions, and analyses how professional expertise can be used as a source for governing in contemporary societies. Changes in society, government politics, as well as in science and the professions themselves, highlight the governing potential of professional experts. The chapter shows how to conceptualize this development in theoretical terms and introduces four perspectives, namely governmentality, welfare governance, organization studies and gender. The governmentality perspective highlights governing through the institutionalization of expertise, how this is predicated on both autonomy and control as well as historically contingent. Clarke and Newman contrast the post-war settlement with new public management (NPM) reforms since the 1980s, whose rhetoric built on a frontal attack on professional or welfare bureaucracies. The chapter explores what determines the specific interplay between professions and organizations. Institutionalization thus offers a switchboard for the development of both organizations and professions, and from this switchboard professions emerge as key agents of institutional change.