Something Old,Something New?: Competing Logics and the Hybrid Nature of New Corporate Professions

The professionalization of certain management occupations, such as project management and human resource management, has been neglected in recent debates on professions, which instead focus upon the deregulation of collegial professions or the failure or unwillingness of new expert occupations to professionalize. Project management represents one of a handful of ‘management professions’ which confound this interpretation, explicitly pursuing a ‘corporate professionalization’ project with some degree of success. This paper focuses on the strategic activities of the principal British professional association in this field, the Association for Project Management (APM), as it negotiates a path between exploiting established sources of legitimacy and exploring a novel conception of professionalism. In the process, the association manipulates collegial and corporate logics of professionalism, in terms of its relationships with key stakeholders, its global orientation, its knowledge base and strategies of occupational closure. Drawing on interviews with APM officials and broader documentary analysis, we analyse the conditions which have produced this hybrid model of professionalism, highlighting the pragmatic management of tensions through the combination of distinct, even contradictory, professionalization logics.     

Introduction – Travail,emploi, société: que nous réserve l'avenir?

Partant de la matière de ce numéro spécial, les auteurs mettent en évidence les grands thèmes de recherche sur l'avenir du travail. Ils décrivent les mutations accélérées du monde du travail qui offrent des possibilités de croissance génératrice d'égalité, mais avec le risque de mal gérer le changement technique, les inégalités (en insistant sur le caractère intersectionnel et persistant des inégalités entre hommes et femmes), les chaînes d'approvisionnement mondiales et les nouvelles possibilités de dialogue social. Partant, ils formulent des recommandations pour renforcer la protection des travailleurs et les institutions qui les représentent, revoir les cadres réglementaires et les systèmes fiscaux, et enfin assurer des transitions équitables.     

Disposable dispositions: reflections upon the work of Iris Marion Young in relation to the social oppression of autistic people

This brief commentary piece looks to apply the theories of Iris Marion Young to the social position and oppression of autistic people, as previously theorised by Milton. The concepts of ‘Asymmetrical symmetry’ and the ‘Five faces of oppression’ are explored in this regard. The article concludes by arguing that autistic people, particularly those who have significant intellectual impairments, can be socially marginalised to the extent of occupying the social position of ‘non-human’ with the staggering consequences for social well-being that this implies.     

Critical Race Theory,policy rhetoric and outcomes: the case of Muslim schools in Britain

The expansion of state-funded Muslim schools in Britain since 1998 has developed against a backdrop of sustained public political rhetoric around the wider position of British Muslims in both political and educational contexts. This article explores the public policy rhetoric around Muslim schools under New Labour and the subsequent Coalition and Conservative governments and compares how these narratives align with outcomes in terms of numbers of, and types of, denominational Muslim faith schools in Britain. The article applies a Critical Race Theory approach based on the construction of counter-narrative through a critical analysis of policy and its outcomes. This analysis is contextualised through exploring the implications of counter-terror strategies such as Prevent for the political and educational equity of British Muslims as stakeholders in the state. Against this context the article explores the extent to which successive policy frameworks and political narratives around faith schooling have played out in terms of denominational state-funded Muslim schools. Whilst gains have been made under New Labour and the successive Coalition and Conservative governments, critical analysis reveals that public policy narratives allow for a misleading account of the extent to which Muslim communities have been enfranchised through state funding for Islamic schools.     

Transformative capacity, information technology, and the making of business 'experts'

This paper explores the making of experts and the basis of claims to expertise in corporate organisational settings. The performance of expertise within organisations is increasingly associated with the implementation and use of integrated business information systems which purport to abstract the world into an informational form to make businesses run more efficiently. We argue that as these systems are put to work to replace the calculations of human experts, we are required to rethink how expertise is constituted as a political and performative process. We focus on the provisos and qualifications that surround the use of calculative techniques and the worries and scepticism over the correctness, accuracy and interpretation of numbers and figures derived from systems of calculation. Rather than identifying expertise as the capacity to make calculations and to abstract ‘representations’ from the ‘real world’, a job increasingly done by information systems, we find expertise being performed in the transformation of things of different orders which enables representations to be returned to the world through allusions to their transformative effect.