Professional Work: A Sociological Approach (review)

Professional Work: A Sociological Approach. By Kevin T. Leicht and Mary L. Fennell.Blackwell, 2001. 254 pp. Paper, $29.95.

The world of professional and managerial work has changed drastically in the past twenty years. Job security, internal labor markets, and organizational loyalty, while still more common in practice than they appear in some analyses, have lost their normative power. Project teams, matrix organizations, internal and independent contracting, stock value, and stock options are the buzzwords of choice. It is in this context that Leicht and Fennell offer their new analysis of professional managerial work.

At the heart of the book is an argument, simple in outline but supported by a wealth of data from a variety of sources, that professionals and managers are switching places. Professionals are becoming corporate employees and losing their autonomy, while an elite group of managers is increasingly successful in its own professionalizing project.

The argument for the bureaucratizing of professionals follows a well-trod trail. Begin with an account of the standard professional model — drawn in large part from well-worn analysis of the two archetypical professions, law and medicine — then go on to show that such professions have become increasingly bureaucratized and subject to the external control of the managerially mediated market. In the process they lose that very characteristic that made them professionals in the first place: an ability to use their autonomous expertise in the service of clients, insulated from the pernicious influences of the market, bureaucracies, and others not committed to the professional ideal of service. Leicht and Fennel draft a good deal of empirical material in support of this account.

The second part of the argument is a little more novel. It begins with an analysis of the "professionalizing" attempts of management during the twentieth century, from scientific to human resource management. It ends with a discussion of neo-entrepreneurialism, in which the lower ranks of management are replaced with contingent or short-term staff: occupational and expert, even professional, in orientation, but all subject to the rigorous control of the market as mediated and interpreted by an autonomous cadre of elite, "professional," managers.

Both of these are recognizable trends in the workplace and providing a coherent account of these is the real virtue of the book. Where the book runs into problems, however, is in its transformation of this empirical argument into a claim to theoretical innovation. Let me point to just two arguments that seem problematic.

Surely it is long since time to recognize that many professions have been bureaucratized since their origin: corporate accounting, engineering, marketing, human relations, and many others. Doctors and lawyers are indeed increasingly employed under conditions not dissimilar to those of other corporate professionals, and, yes, becoming increasingly subject to profit-focused management, but sociologists need to avoid the habit of using doctors and lawyers as proxies for generalizable statements about professions, particularly when using the term in its folk sense as the kind of job that college students might aspire to.

The second argument is even more contentious. Certainly a number of former managerial tasks have been cast off to become "expertise" in the hands of experts for sale. And the growth of the neo-entrepreneurial firm, the decline of unions, and the gutting of governmental constraints, have minimized the limits on what managers can do in the pursuit of profit. But it is the latter constraint that remains critical. If elite managers have freedom to act, it is as the direct agents of capital, as the owners of stock options, their position held at the whim of a rising stock market. Instead of the supposed struggle between managers and shareholders that the forecasters of growing managerial autonomy predicted, we have the revival of a full-blown capitalism, freed by technology of the need for a large managerial class. If the role of managers in the bureaucratic control of employees is being diminished by the mechanisms of a hegemonic market, why see this as a managerial professional project...