"Looking behind the curtain. Organizational categories, status & background institutions"

Abstract

While deprofessionalization is a contemporary common phenomenon, the case of the pharmacy profession in many European countries (e.g., France, Germany and Italy) is different. Comparing historically the USA and Italy, where the profession faced similar institutional and sociotechnical challenges, we ground a theoretical explanation of why its status persisted in Italy and not in the US. Background institutions in the US and Italy, respectively the market and the State, set the burden of proof differentially on the professional and corporate logics in the 1910’-1920’. Corporate pharmacy became dominant in the US while the profession in Italy. Exclusive attention to foreground conflicts between two logics would leave this unexplained. Later in the 1960’, the membership of the organizational category of pharmacy in different classes (retail business vs. health care) determined the different reactions to the challenge of pharmacists being turned into shopkeepers. In the US, due to insufficient category contra...