Professional Ideology Research Articles

Redrawing the boundary of medical expertise: medically assisted reproduction and the debate on Italian bioconstitutionalism

In 2004, the Italian Parliament passed a controversial law on medically assisted reproduction (Law 40/2004). The Law obliged clinicians to create a maximum of three embryos during one in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle and transfer them simultaneously into the patient’s uterus. With this “three embryo” standard, the Parliament sought to secure the realization of rights of IVF embryos. Drawing on the concepts of boundary-work [Gieryn, T. F. 1983. “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists.” American Sociological Review 48 (6): 781–795] and bioconstitutionalism [Jasanoff, S., ed. 2011. Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.], this article explores the role that the constitutional obligations of the Italian State towards its citizens, including IVF embryos as its new “citizen subjects,” played in how it envisaged and demarcated the professional boundaries of medical expertise. It argues that the latter depended upon how it balanced its commitments to protect the rights of IVF embryos and those of adult citizens. As such, the demarcation of the jurisdictional boundaries of medical expertise, and the definition of constitutional rights, formed two sides of the same governing project.

Retraction Statement: Culture as Constitutive: An Exploration of Audience and Journalist Perceptions of Journalism in Samoa

Much research implicitly suggests that journalism values arise from culturally removed organizational structures or shared occupational training and few studies examine the perspective of journalism from both audiences and journalists. These omissions are important given the essentiality of mutually constructed and culturally embedded normative behaviors within journalism. This research examines audiences and journalists in Samoa, a recently independent, postcolonial country that relies upon a very traditional, shared national identity for its relatively nascent cohesion. This study aims to gain a better understanding of how local culture can set parameters and expectations for journalism; how journalists negotiate culture into their own professional ideology; and how audiences understand journalism within a cultural context.

Re-theorizing the configuration of organizational fields: the IIRC and the pursuit of ‘Enlightened’ corporate reporting

This paper studies the emergence of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and its attempts to institutionalize integrated reporting as a practice that is critical to the relevance and value of corporate reporting. Informed by Suddaby and Viale’s [(2011). Professionals and field-level change: institutional work and the professional project. Current Sociology, 59, 423–442] theorization of how professionals reconfigure organizational fields, the paper delineates the strategies and mechanisms through which the IIRC has sought to enroll the support of a wide range of stakeholder groups for the idea of integrated reporting in order to deliver a fundamental reconfiguration of the corporate reporting field. The paper’s analysis reinforces the significance to any such field reconfiguration of the reciprocal and mutual arrangements between influential professionals and other powerful actors but does so in a way that (a) refines Suddaby and Viale’s theorization of processes of field-level change and (b) pinpoints the fundamental policy challenges facing the IIRC. Gieryn’s [(1983). Boundary work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. American Sociological Review, 48 (6), 781–795] notion of boundary work is operationalized to capture some of the complexity and dynamism of the change process that is not sufficiently represented by Suddaby and Viale’s more sequentialist theorization. From a policy perspective, the paper demonstrates just how much the IIRC’s prospects for success in reconfiguring the corporate reporting field depend on its ability to reconfigure the mainstream investment field. Ultimately, this serves to question whether the IIRC’s conceptualization of ‘enlightened’ corporate reporting is sufficiently powerful and persuasive to stimulate ‘enlightened’ investment behavior focused on the medium and long term – and, more generally stresses the theoretical significance of considering connections across related organizational fields in institutional analyses of field reconfiguration efforts.

Being appropriately professional: the interaction between professionalism,ICTand knowledge transfer

This article examines how professionalism impacts on the interaction and knowledge transfer of professionals within open plan workspaces and between distributed workplaces when usingICT. Knowledge is key to the system of professions and the power of professionals. At the same time, professional work requires professionals to behave in an appropriate and professional‐like manner, and this includes sharing knowledge with colleagues. Yet, the ideology of professionalism is changing. Alongside, professionals are working differently, including across distributed workplaces and often interacting viaICT. These shifting contexts make understanding the interaction between professionalism, knowledge transfer andICTcrucial. Drawing on Goffman's work, particularly his exposition of interaction rituals, interviews with accountants reveal that when usingICT, the professional framework of interaction – what can be said, who has the right to speak and who is the audience – meets appropriateness in sometimes contradictory ways, potentially limiting the growth and propagation of knowledge.

Cultural citizenship in the digital future(s): in search of a new code of praxis for South African journalism education and training

This article introduces ten guidelines for a new code of praxis, based on critical complexity theory, to steer journalism education and training (JET) into the ‘digital future(s)’. The concept of cultural citizenship, which establishes a link between teaching and learning and the construction of citizenship, is introduced. The departure point is that contemporary South African media and society are characterised by levels of complexity which have rendered traditional realist modernist frameworks absolute. However, both the journalism industry and JET still refer to a conservative neoliberal pluralist Western professional ideology, in which a link between public service and consumer power is presupposed. The failure of this entrenched ideological framework of JET to account for postmodern notions of difference and diversity contributes to the continuing political and cultural marginalisation of the poor black majority. Amongst the numerous challenges for JET in an era of increasing multiculturalism and technological convergence, this article attempts to find an alternative conceptual framework within which civically minded journalists could be produced. The suggestion is made that efforts over the past few decades to introduce the African moral philosophy of ubuntu as such a framework have seemingly made little progress, because of its roots in traditional (rather than (post)modern) African culture. Instead, this article argues that critical complexity theory is better suited to provide a current framework for cultural citizenship. Such a position, however, does not imply total relativism and a lack of ethical grounding. Three imperatives – the provisional, the critical reflexive and the world-disclosing – are introduced and provide ten non-foundational principles for JET in South Africa.

Existential Antagonisms: Boundary Work and the Professional Ideology of Turkish Industrial Designers

Industrial design (ID) is a fairly young and largely unknown profession in Turkey. Although significant developments have taken place in the field of ID in the past 15 years, the scope of scholarly attempts to analyze the sociological meaning of designing in the Turkish context is extremely limited. We use boundary work and professional ideology as salient concepts for a sociological understanding the ongoing professionalization process of Turkish industrial designers, who are developing professional identities and striving for recognition in the larger culture. This paper relies on 20 semi-structured interviews conducted with key players (i.e., ideologues) of the Turkish ID scene to analyze these boundary-work processes. We found that the positive collective identity of Turkish industrial designers is built on a formulation of negative others. These negative others are ideological antagonists that are pushed to the “other” side of the demarcation line. Negative others are especially dominant in the professional ideology of Turkish industrial designers because the perceived threats from these antagonists shape the collective consciousness. However, the construction of these others is an ambivalent process in which they also become ideological “friends.” We also demonstrate that professional ideology plays a pivotal role in producing, reproducing, and legitimizing claims of professionalism.

(Un)Familiar spaces of television production: the BBC’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1956

The sharing of expertise and know-how was an important practice in the early days of television production; delegations from national broadcasters visited each other to negotiate agreements concerning co-production and programme exchange. On one such occasion, in spring 1956, the BBC visited Soviet Central Television and their production facilities in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev. Using that visit as vantage point, this article examines production values and professional ideologies in relation to the material spaces of television production. The article argues that the British delegation’s encounter with (un)familiar spaces of television production forced them to articulate their own production values in relation to material spaces. The final discussion suggests that the tensions provoked by the discrepancy between production values at Soviet Central Television and at the BBC may inform the main currents of television studies and television history.

General Practitioners' Discretion of Preventive Needs

This article examines general practitioners’ discretion in preventive contexts. Based on semi-structured interviews with 15 general practitioners, we examine how lifestyle is used in their discretionary practices in contexts of healthcare prevention. Despite common educational background and professional ideology, GPs’ do not share lifestyle and our analyses show that this matters to their discretion of patients’ need for lifestyle intervention. The correspondence between general practitioners’ preventive strategies and their own lifestyle preferences is interpreted as evidence of autonomy in general practice where general practitioners act relatively autonomously and differ in their interpretation of how preventive policies should be exercised in practice towards patients.Keywords: discretion, lifestyle, health prevention and promotion, street-level bureaucrats, general practitioners

Maintaining professionalism: emotional labor among lawyers as client advisors

Dominant professional ideology dictates that lawyers behave professionally toward clients by using logical, rational reasoning and expression and by leaving emotion and personal feelings out of their work. However, this ideology overlooks the fact that lawyers who work in settings that feature high client contact often labor under very emotionally charged circumstances. As a result, lawyers must use emotional labor to cope with their own feelings while maintaining their professional display. Using qualitative data based on semi-structured interviews with twenty lawyers in the Midwestern United States, I show that the lawyers interviewed in this study cope with their own feelings by using emotional labor to suppress the spontaneous expression of personal feelings, while working to evoke a display of emotions that does not run afoul of traditional standards of legal professionalism. Their use of emotional labor to cope with their feelings came in four forms: expression of genuine emotion, deep acting, surface acting, and detachment. The findings suggest that despite wide scholarly discussion of alternative conceptions of professionalism, the need to expand these discussions among law students and practitioners is still pressing.

FOLLOWING THE ACTION

Live sports blogging is a relatively new form of journalism in wide and frequent use by media companies but has received little attention from the academy. This article outlines a study that explored the belief and value system behind live sports blogging to establish whether shifts were taking place within the professional ideology of sports journalism. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 live sports bloggers in the United Kingdom. The study found that live bloggers retained core journalistic values and beliefs of balancing objectivity and subjectivity, immediacy, providing a public service and editorial autonomy. However, live blogging's challenges of immediacy, interactivity and shifting consumption patterns have led to a reimagining of what these concepts mean and the skills and competences required. Live bloggers perceived their role as community builders and mediators of discussion as well as information providers, and this represents a new openness and inclusivity within the occupational base. Participants did not regard these changes to be a dumbing down of standards but rather a paradigm shift towards flattening hierarchies between journalist and audience. The findings suggest live bloggers have shown a greater willingness to adapt than previous research into the migration of sports journalists to digital platforms has found.

Training the scientist–practitioner in the twenty-first century: A risk–benefit analysis

The scientist–practitioner (S–P) model plays a central role in the professional ideology guiding most graduate training programs in clinical and counseling psychology. Unfortunately, the ideals of the S–P model are rarely fulfilled. It may be helpful to examine the relevant issues from a risk–benefit analysis. Common benefits of the S–P model include the satisfaction that practitioners derive from helping clients in distress, improvements to graduate teaching, refinements to psychological research, and the positive influence when faculty members serve as effective role models for the next generation of psychologists. Potential risks of the S–P model occur when faculty members take time away from other university chores, especially if it would reduce the likelihood of tenure and promotion. However, the biggest risk lies in the potential damage to the field of psychology, created when psychologists lose sight of important issues in the field. Graduate training programs are encouraged to maximize the benefits while minimizing the risks, thereby continuing to promote the ideals of the S–P model.

Inequalities, marginality and the professions

Professional ideologies generally commit to addressing inequalities among clients and/or the public as part of their altruistic ethos. Sociologists of professions in the Anglo-American context have written on the extent to which this commitment is honoured by professional groups, either in a positive or more critical light. This article, however, argues that professions cannot be conceptualised as equal, homogeneous entities and are best seen as hierarchically differentiated groups based on varying forms of exclusionary social closure. As such, it reviews the literature on inequalities between professional groups from a neo-Weberian approach – which is favoured over other perspectives – through the concept of marginality, primarily using the illustrative context of health care. With particular reference to the case of complementary and alternative medicine, the article highlights that future research needs to focus more on how positions of marginality influence inequalities beyond the professions – in other words, on how inequalities within professions affect inequalities without.

The Professional Ideology of Criminologists

In the 1970s, rejection of offender treatment as misguided and ineffective was common among criminologists. Recently, however, there are reasons to believe that faith in correctional intervention may have returned as a core feature of criminologists’ professional ideology. To date, no one has undertaken a systematic investigation of criminologists’ opinions on rehabilitation. Drawing on a random sample of criminologists, the current study examines the extent to which the discipline stands ready to support a central role for offender treatment. Finding broad-based support for rehabilitation, we discuss the implications of these results for correctional policy.

Branding politics: Emotion, authenticity, and the marketing culture of American political communication

This article examines and critiques the logic and practices of branding that inform contemporary American political campaigns within the context of ethical surplus, sign value versus use value, emotion and reason, and the tension of authenticity and cynicism. The original research is based upon 38 one-on-one, in-depth interviews with political consultants, including media strategists, communication directors, and advertising producers who are involved in the encoding and cultural production of political discourse. The qualitative findings illuminate a professional ideology among these elite practitioners that obfuscates the pursuit of power by strategizing texts that involve emotional evocation rather than rational deliberation and embed candidates within signifiers of and proxies for authenticity. These efforts are intended to strike a disinterested, non-instrumental pose on behalf of the “branded candidates” they represent.

Cultural Mismatch in Pedagogy Workshops: Training Non-native Teachers in Communicative Language Teaching

As a professional ideology, the Communicative Language Teaching approach (CLT) (Ellis, 1996, 2012; Lee & VanPatten, 2003) has been exported to non-Western contexts with varying degrees of success (e.g., Lewis & McCook, 2002; Li, 1998). The authors of this paper, both non-native speakers of English who have lived and taught in the USA for 20 years, discuss their experiences training teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) from China and Iraq/Kurdistan. Confirming previous research on the topic, they found teachers’ beliefs about teaching to be highly resistant to change, even in the face of evidence that negates them (Bax, 2003; Brown, 2009; Nespor, 1987; Pajares, 1992). This article analyzes the cultural parameters of EFL contexts that seem to be at the root of teachers’ reluctance toward CLT. The authors argue that this hesitation is related to a mismatch between teachers’ and trainers’ belief systems. This phenomenon is explored in light of cultural and ideological factors. The authors draw on Kachru’s (1992, 2006) work on the power dynamics between Inner Circle, Outer Circle, and Expanding Circle countries (see also Burns, 2013; Canagarajah, 2013).

The socialization of medicine in the era of São Paulo Governor Adhemar de Barros

The article analyzes how the process of the professionalization of physicians in São Paulo related to healthcare policy under the administration of São Paulo governor Adhemar de Barros (1947-1951) during a period of broad change in the realm of health known by São Paulo physicians as the "socialization of medicine." Medical professionalism confronted certain ambivalences under this populist administration, including doctors' struggle to achieve pay equal to that of state public attorneys; the establishment of a state health department; and some contradictory ties between the area of health under Adhemar and the professional ideology and organization of medicine in São Paulo. The article undertakes a more in-depth analysis of the ideological manifestations of important leaders in the state's medical community.

Producing Protest News

This article examines journalists’ narratives of the constellations of factors that shaped the coverage of the 2011–2012 social protest in Israel, and how journalists used the protest to negotiate their roles, practices, and values against the backdrop of their own professional and economic struggles. Based on in-depth interviews with reporters and editors who were involved in the coverage of the protest movement, this article analyzes journalists’ interpretations and negotiations of the various influences on their work during the two major waves of the protest. An analysis of patterns of collision and concurrence between individual, organizational, and professional domains of influence in journalists’ narratives shows that while the norm of objectivity remains a key site of tension in relation to other factors, considerations of newsworthiness are constructed as complementing and justifying all other types of influence. An examination of diachronic patterns suggests that journalists’ individual conditions and positions play a greater role in journalists’ narratives in the first stage of the protest, giving way to professional values and organizational economic considerations in later stages. Although these findings further complicate the protest paradigm, they also show a dominant pattern of “paradigm repair” at the level of both journalists’ professional ideology and protest coverage.

Stephen Schryer Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American FictionFantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction. Stephen Schryer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. 278.

<i>Stephen Schryer</i> Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction<i>Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction</i>. Stephen Schryer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. 278.

Old Left, New Class: Literary Anxiety in the Consumers’ Republic

In the post-New Deal era, the social location of the intellectual became one of paradox and anxiety. Understood as integral to a cultural center, organizing society through the dissemination of ideas, intellectual work emerged as the unlocatable nucleus of US culture. Three recent monographs in different ways speak to this transitional and contradictory period in American literary production: Stephen Schryer’s Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction (2011), Michael Szalay’s Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party (2012), and Alan M. Wald’s American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (2012). Whereas Schryer and Szalay address the fiction of and for the emerging professional-managerial class, Wald considers the transformation and suppression of the pro-Communist literary Left during the forties and fifties. They all nonetheless engage with what Lizabeth Cohen terms the postwar “Consumers’ Republic,” in which “good consumer” became synonymous with “good citizen.” What is the cultural work of literary fiction in a milieu in which nothing, it seems, exists outside the terms of commodity exchange? These studies trace this anxiety through the mid-century decades in which the dream of the Old Left met the fantasy of the new class.

Joint geriatric and old‐age psychiatric wards in the UK, 1940s–early 1990s: a historical study

This study aims to investigate the history of joint geriatric-psychiatric units. For policy making and planning of high-quality clinical service models, clinical and social contexts need to be considered. Longitudinal, contextual information can be provided by historical analyses, including the successes and failures of earlier, similar services. Historical analyses complement clinical, randomised controlled studies and may contribute to ensuring optimum outcomes for future schemes. Standard historical methodology was used, including searching published sources and institutional and personal archives and conducting a 'witness seminar' and individual oral history interviews. Proposals to create joint units have existed since 1947. Most clinically successful units were led by enthusiastic, dedicated clinicians. Joint units had the potential to provide appropriate assessment and treatment for patients with multiple disorders and education for staff and students. Joint units never became widespread. Reasons for the limited success of joint geriatric-psychiatric units might have included personalities of individuals, administrative boundaries separating geriatrics and medicine, unequal numbers of geriatricians and old-age psychiatrists, varying professional ideologies about the meaning of 'integrated' services, lack of reciprocity for each other's inpatients and lack of government support. Identified stumbling blocks need to be considered when planning joint clinical schemes. If current research indicates benefits of integrated wards for patients and their families, there needs to be ways to ensure that personal factors and fashions of management or government re-prioritisation will not lead to their premature termination.