De-professionalism, neo-liberalism and social inequalities

What is the future for professionalism and the public sector? There are several reasons why we should remain optimistic that professionalism as a trope concept should endure, not least because technological advances increase work productivity along with the demand for new skills. This is despite the fact that austerity policies in the United Kingdom (UK) embody a presence of continued uncertainty, lacking an evidential commitment to rebuilding public services. In past years a professional person with recognised expertise may have developed a life narrative, linear and cumulative, a narrative that made sense in a highly bureaucratic world. A different entrepreneurial world entailing ‘creative destruction’ (Reinert and Reinert, 2006: 55) requires people being at ease about not reckoning the consequences of change or not knowing what comes next. Neo-liberalism, involving a remaking of the state, reconfigured to serve the demands of capital, has meant that some professionals may have lost authority arguably because the state has lost its authority. Instead of celebrating the virtue of professional expertise, a system based on neo-liberal ideas tends to view professions as raw material within a general commodification process. This has given rise to a different rationale: it must ask what value the corporation has for the community, how it can serve civic interests rather than just its ledger of profit and loss. Whereas the state has a capacity to extend audit, intervention and knowledge transfer, an argument has been made that across areas of the public sector there has been a loss of autonomy in professional practice. De-professionalisation has become part of the neo-liberal lexicon defining a continuation of the marketisation agenda; hence it follows that if austerity finished tomorrow, it is likely that this de-professionalisation would continue.

De-professionalisation, defined by terms that circumscribe the reduced capacity of the public sector workforce, has become enmeshed in the wider debate around rising inequalities in the UK. Announced in May 2019, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) established an interdisciplinary research forum, chaired by Professor Angus Deaton, to examine disparities of income, wealth, health and political access. ‘Amid fears Britain is on the cusp of sinking towards deep and ingrained inequalities following a decade of stagnant pay growth, there's a real question about whether democratic capitalism is working, when it's only working for part of the population’ (IFS, 2019b: 26–7).