Co-operating for a change? Tackling classed exclusions through collective ownership

Ian McDonald and Louise Ashley

Chapter 20 in Research Handbook on the Sociology of the Professions, 2025, pp 306-321 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter analyses diversity management in the professions. Specifically, we consider the management of social class within the policy arena of social mobility in the United Kingdom, focusing on architecture. Our policy review underscores the dominance of a highly problematic neoliberal approach to social mobility, which is enthusiastically taken up by law and accountancy, but which has made little impact in architecture, despite the profession being extremely socially exclusive. New empirical research with architects shows that subjective professional values including the foregrounding of design integrity and disavowal of managerialism are largely responsible for the failure of this policy to land. However, managers of cooperative practices, a valued organisational form in architecture, advocate a more radical form of diversity management, pointing toward the possibility of a more substantive form of classed inclusion. Our theoretical conclusions underline the limitations of theorising ‘the professions’ as a singular entity, that can be read off a narrow range of occupational milieus; in contrast, inter-professional diversity is underlined. Our research also highlights the limitations of theorising class as a facet of an individual. Instead, we argue inequalities within the professions would be better served by responding to broader issues of ownership, organisational culture, and employee democratisation.

Keywords: Architecture; Diversity; Equity and Inclusion; Exclusion; Sociology of the Professions; Social Class; Social Mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035323074
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