Gleeson, Denis and Knights, David (2006) Challenging dualism : Public professionalism in 'troubled'times. Sociology, 40 (2). pp. 277-295. ISSN 0038-0385
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
In recent decades neo-liberal reform has significantly impacted on public sector professionals. Sociological interest in such impact has tended to focus on professionals as subjects of such reform: as either de-professionalized 'victims' who feel oppressed by the structures of control or strategic operators seeking to contest the spaces and contradictions of market, managerial and audit cultures. Such a dualism is reflective of wider separations of agency and structure that have plagued sociology down the years. Our approach challenges modernizing agendas which seek to re-professionalize or empower professionals without examining the changing conditions of their work or the neo-liberal conditions which frame their practice. It also questions the policy outcomes of reconciling the dualism between agency and structure through a 'third way' politics that purports to remove the tensions and conflicts between professions and various stakeholders, the private and the public, and markets and civic society.