Absent professionalisation: exploring how a welfare state area fails to materialise in a professional domain

Tone Alm Andreassen

Chapter 15 in Research Handbook on the Sociology of the Professions, 2025, pp 222-237 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Professionalisation is often perceived as a process by which occupations pursue a ‘professional project’ aimed at achieving or maintaining status. In contrast, this chapter explores the professionalisation of occupational domains as opposed to individual occupations. It does so through a case study of a welfare state area that, unlike most other welfare state areas, did not materialise in a professional domain. The case demonstrates that the success or failure of professionalisation efforts is influenced by factors related to the construction of the tasks (the alignment of professions’ theorising with core agendas of state actors), the professions (whether they seize or leave an occupational domain), and the field (whether it manifests as a structure around a common enterprise or a fluid subfield at the margins of fields centred around a different core), as well as by the broader institutional and historical context. In a Scandinavian welfare state, the most significant factors appear to be the professionalisation agendas (or lack thereof) held by key state actors and the role played by (or abandoned by) hybrid professionals – blending positions in the state administration and in professionally controlled work organizations.

Keywords: Professionalisation; Vocational rehabilitation; Welfare state; Norway; Occupational domains (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035323074
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035323081.00025 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:22869_15

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().