Public service professionals ‘under attack’?

There are many forms of public service delivery – providing healthcare, policing, educating children, assisting unemployed citizens in finding work – and in many ways, these services depend on professional workers. Policemen, medical doctors, nurses, teachers and welfare workers deliver services to clients. Although there are many types of professionals and it is difficult to define professionalism in clear and consistent ways, public service professionals have a few things in common. They primarily deal with clients – as cases, often complex cases – but they also serve public goals, such as safety, public health and employment. This case treatment is regulated by many rules and standards and to some or a large extent, these rules and standards are set by the occupational fields to which professional workers belong. The more standards are set by these occupational fields, the stronger these professionals are, also as far as autonomies and powers are concerned. This has always been legitimated by the fact that traditional professional rules and standards both concern case treatment, as well as wider public service ethics (e.g. Wilensky 1964; Freidson 2001). Professional fields not only establish bodies of knowledge and expertise in order to regulate complex case treatment; they also develop shared service orientations, in order to treat cases rightly and serve society ethically and justly. Professional associations secure both technical and ethical regulation.

Despite these clear features, public professionalism has always been a slippery concept, and increasingly, public professionalism seems to be under attack. To begin with, the value of functionalist readings of professionalism and professional strength is increasingly criticized. Professional regulation guarantees neither effective case treatment, nor societal gains. In fact, according to critical and political readings, (public) professionalism has mainly been a self-serving project, advancing the interests of professional workers themselves, instead of clients and society at large. Furthermore, there has been an uneasy relationship between professionalism and organizational contexts. Although contradictions between professionals and organizational action are logical and perhaps even desirable, they are contested as well. Most professional public service delivery occurs within bureaucratic and organizational systems. Clarke and Newman (1997) speak of bureau-professional regimes. Lately, these regimes are being reconfigured.