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Title: Professionalism as Legitimizing Ideology Author: Kevin Carson Date: July 18, 2006 Language: en Topics: respectability Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/07/professionalism-as-legitimizing.html
Professionalism, as a friend of mine once put it, is the last refuge of
scoundrels.
The concept of professionalism has achieved an unprecedented hegemony in
society at large. For a very large part of the population, one’s
identity as a professional is the main source of reference.
People commonly, in situations where they are required to sum themselves
up, simply identify themselves as professional. The “professional”
self-designation appears in the same social contexts as “citizen” did
fifty years ago. In the 1950s, it was common for someone to refer to
himself, in situations completely removed from politics or government,
as “just an ordinary citizen,” or the like. Today, for many in the white
collar middle class, it’s “a professional.” Professionalism has acquired
the same ideological significance once held by civic culture and
citizenship. In either case, the individual was defined in terms of some
particular authority relation in which he existed.
Letters to advice columnists are commonly introduced by some phrase like
this: “Dear Abby, my husband and I are both professionals in our
40s....” The implied subtext, of course, is “...so obviously this isn’t
something we caused by our own stupidity,” or “...so this is a
legitimate problem, unlike the idiocy you get from most of the
beer-swilling yahoos who read your column.”
The concept of the profession has also largely supplanted that of the
skilled trade in the occupational realm. The adjective “professional” is
used almost exclusively to describe work or behavior that would
previously have been described as “businesslike,” or characterized by a
sense of craftsmanship. “Professional” and “unprofessional” are used as
words of praise and blame, respectively, in occupations that were never
regarded as professions back when the term had any meaning. People in
virtually all white collar or service jobs, regardless of the level of
training associated with them, are expected to display “professionalism”
in their work attitudes and dress.
The concept of “professionalism” has spread like a cancer and
contaminated most occupations. Originally, the culture of the
professions grew out of the skilled trades. A master of arts, for
example, was analogous to a master of any other trade, with bachelors
and undergraduates corresponding to journeymen and apprentices; a
university was a place where one apprenticed to a master scholar. I’d be
happy to compromise on the original five professions--letters, medicine,
law, holy orders, and arms--if we could reclaim the concept of the
skilled trade for everything else.
So why has professionalism so successfully colonized the entire realm of
work? Who benefits from promoting it as an ideology? What functions does
it serve?
The fundamental purpose of professionalism, like that of any other
ideology, is to get people’s minds right--in this case, workers.
Professionalism fosters a house-slave mentality by getting large
categories of workers to identify with management (Good ole Massa knows
we’re really like him, white on the inside--we’re not like those
shiftless old field slaves), setting white collar against blue collar
workers, and enabling management to rule through a divide-and-conquer
strategy. There’s a saying that a dishonest man is the easiest target
for a con artist. Likewise, it’s a lot easier to oppress a
status-insecure snob.
Professionalism undermines the separation of work and home. Throughout
the entire service sector, increasingly, low-paid wage workers are
expected to think of their job as a calling, and of customer service as
something to sacrifice “ownlife” for. In nursing, an occupation that
fell under the spell of professionalism long ago, this is old news. For
all of living memory, hospital managements have cynically manipulated
nurses’ concern for their patients to guilt them into working unwanted
overtime. This is often done, deliberately, in preference to hiring
enough staff to avoid overtime, because it economizes on the costs of
benefits.
But now the same levels of selfless “professional” dedication are
required in some of the lowest levels of the two-tier economy. For
example, consider Wal-Mart’s abortive 24/7 availability policy at a
store in South Carolina, which required people with shitty $8/hour
retail jobs to live on call the same way that only doctors used to. The
policy was abandoned in the face of public protest, and is not yet
adopted as a policy at any level above the individual stores; but
apparently it’s been required in other Wal-Mart stores as well, and is
probably the wave of the future if the bosses can get away with it.
Here’s how a store manager justified the policy, in terms of the values
of “professional” dedication:
“We have many people with set schedules who aren’t here when we need
them for our customers,” said John Knuckles [!], a manager at the store,
which is located in the Nitro Marketplace shopping center and employs
more than 400.
“It is to take care of the customers, that’s the only reason,” he said.
Workers who have had regular shifts at the store for years now have to
commit to being available for any shift from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven
days a week. If they can’t make the commitment by the end of this week,
they’ll be fired.
“It shouldn’t cause any problem, if they [store employees] are concerned
about their customers,” Knuckles said [emphasis added].
Ken Blanchard has expressed great dissatisfaction with the TGIF
mentality, speaking for many managers who resent their workers’ view of
the job as a means to an end, and of their life in the outside world as
the end their job serves. As Blanchard put it in his introduction to the
Fish! Philosophy book, “too many people are trading time on the job to
satisfy needs elsewhere...” Imagine that! People view going to a place
where they’re treated like shit, worked like fucking dogs, and required
to take orders as a necessary evil, rather than looking forward to it as
the central source of meaning in their lives. Next, he’ll be complaining
about the people in prison who count down the days until they get out.
Come to think of it, I guess it’s only a matter of time until prison
inmates join the ranks of “professionals,” and are expected to volunteer
for “overtime” after they complete their sentences. After all, a good
professional is willing to do whatever it takes to avoid inconveniencing
all those customers who are waiting on their license plates or laundry.
Finally, management tries to identify “professionalism” with obedience
and docility. This means, in concrete terms, that talking back to
management and fighting for one’s rights are forms of conduct unbecoming
“professionals.” Pressuring management to improve working conditions,
reduce hours, increase staffing or pay, and the like, are the kinds of
“low-class” behavior that proles engage in. In the old days, before the
metastatic spread of professionalism, professions tended to maintain a
collegiate mentality, an internal solidarity, against the demands of
authority, much like the master craftsmen who resisted the watering down
of quality in the industrial revolution. A professional might resist
unreasonable demands from outside, like a demand to do substandard work
or cut corners to compensate for understaffing, because of professional
pride. Today, outside the old-line professions, professionalism has
ceased to be a moral basis for resistance to authority, and instead
become another force for promoting obediance.
This aspect of professionalism gets back to the divide and conquer
function I mentioned above: “professionalism” means seeing oneself in
the same social category as management (albeit at a lower rung), and
part of the same “team.”
Again, it’s the vicarious self-esteem acquired by a house slave who
identifies with the owner rather than with the field slaves. It’s just
another example of the more general phenomenon of the authoritarian
personality: the oppressed overcomes his sense of oppression by
identifying with the oppressor and directing his resentment, instead,
against out-groups helpfully identified for him by those in authority.
For the authoritarian personality, the bad guy is not the one whose
rules he suffers under, but rather the one who seeks to change those
rules or evade them. In the eye of the authoritarian, the rebel is the
real enemy because he thinks he is better than all the others who have
had to suffer from the rules.