Introduction

The role of ‘public’ professionals is one that has continually been contested. They are the bearers of forms of knowledge and expertise that the public value, but at the same time the public – in various manifestations – has often resisted or resented the power of professionals to make judgments about their lives and to broker access to the resources they need. It is professionals who are entrusted with the impossible job of reconciling ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ and of managing the relationship between the hopes and fears of those they serve. Professionals are also the carriers of all of the contradictions of ‘modern’ welfare states, embodying the dreams of equality and social justice while struggling with the realities of unruly populations, administrative recalcitrance and political game playing. It is no wonder, then, that professionals have always experienced themselves as under pressure. But of course the rewards can also be great. While such rewards are unevenly distributed across the hierarchical ordering of different professions, para-professions and support workers, they include for some relatively secure jobs with good pensions and rewarding work, not to mention the gratitude of clients and the respect of the wider society.

What, then, might be specific about the current period? To answer this question I want to do three things in this chapter. First, I want to explore issues of time – how can we understand the present? Can we see a gradual intensification of pressure over time, or is there something distinctive about the current challenges that produces a significant reordering of the meanings and practices of professional work: the places where it is carried out and the constraints professionals operate under? This inevitably raises questions of space in the sense of place – does national context make much difference? Second, I want to raise some questions about professionals as both the objects of change (being done to) and the subjects of change (actors reshaping welfare and service delivery). This opens out a second sense of space – the spaces within the welfare and public service system in which professionals act. In line with much of this volume I argue that professionals and professional work have tended to be the object of reform as modernizing welfare states have sought to challenge ‘producer interests’.