Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Review article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Review article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Challenging dualism
T2 - Public professionalism in 'troubled'times
AU - Gleeson, Denis
AU - Knights, David
PY - 2006/4/30
Y1 - 2006/4/30
N2 - In recent decades neo-liberal reform has significantly impacted on public sector professionals. Sociological interest in such impact has tended to focus on professionals as subjects of such reform: as either de-professionalized 'victims' who feel oppressed by the structures of control or strategic operators seeking to contest the spaces and contradictions of market, managerial and audit cultures. Such a dualism is reflective of wider separations of agency and structure that have plagued sociology down the years. Our approach challenges modernizing agendas which seek to re-professionalize or empower professionals without examining the changing conditions of their work or the neo-liberal conditions which frame their practice. It also questions the policy outcomes of reconciling the dualism between agency and structure through a 'third way' politics that purports to remove the tensions and conflicts between professions and various stakeholders, the private and the public, and markets and civic society.
AB - In recent decades neo-liberal reform has significantly impacted on public sector professionals. Sociological interest in such impact has tended to focus on professionals as subjects of such reform: as either de-professionalized 'victims' who feel oppressed by the structures of control or strategic operators seeking to contest the spaces and contradictions of market, managerial and audit cultures. Such a dualism is reflective of wider separations of agency and structure that have plagued sociology down the years. Our approach challenges modernizing agendas which seek to re-professionalize or empower professionals without examining the changing conditions of their work or the neo-liberal conditions which frame their practice. It also questions the policy outcomes of reconciling the dualism between agency and structure through a 'third way' politics that purports to remove the tensions and conflicts between professions and various stakeholders, the private and the public, and markets and civic society.
KW - Dualism
KW - Professionalism
KW - Public
U2 - 10.1177/0038038506062033
DO - 10.1177/0038038506062033
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:33645380773
VL - 40
SP - 277
EP - 295
JO - Sociology
JF - Sociology
SN - 0038-0385
IS - 2
ER -