The New Professionals: Professionalisation and the Struggle for Occupational Control in the Field of Project Management

It is now forty years since Wilensky (1964) raised the prospect of ‘The Professionalization of Everyone’ in the American Journal of Sociology. In this time, the professions have been variously seen as an economic and moral cornerstone of contemporary societies (Parsons, 1954; Durkheim, 1957), as bastions of elitism and monopoly power (Freidson, 1970; Johnson, 1972) and, more recently, a self-disciplinary form of governance exerted over expert labour (Fournier, 1999; Anderson- Gough et al., 2000). The rapid expansion of numerous forms of expert labour aspiring to professional status seems in many senses to confirm Wilensky’s prediction, even if this is at times at the expense of the ‘established’ professions. Almost 400 UK-based ‘professional associations’ were identified in a recent report (Perren, 2000), ranging from physiologists to horticulturalists to careers guidance counsellors, such that around 7 million, or 27%, of the UK working population are now identified as professionals or associate professionals (ONS, 2004) – up from around 5 million and 20% in 1998. Many of these ‘professionals’ work outside of the traditional liberal professions, either occupying a ‘para-professional’ role in the same sector, or forming part of the growing mass of organisational and entrepreneurial professionals (Larson, 1977; Reed, 1996).