Introduction

Didier DEMAZIÈRE1 and Richard WITTORSKI2

1CSO, CNRS, Sciences Po, Paris, France

2CIRNEF Laboratory, University of Rouen, France

Professionalization is a concept with a prominent presence in the fields of education, training and work, as well as in public and private organizations. Many observers agree that the term has become polysemous, as its uses dramatically vary depending on the actors using it and their various reasons: to have professional experience recognized, to adapt training to the productive system, to team up in peer communities to improve their status, to invite people to engage in new forms of work, etc. In addition, polysemy around this topic has given rise to debates and tensions as to the different interests invested in the term’s use.

Briefly stated, within organizations, professionalization can denote the appearance of new work expectations: in training spaces, it can translate learning processes and the construction of knowledge and skills (a term often used when we talk about professionalization); in public policies, it can express intentions for reforms and the establishment of new forms of governance; it can also be used by employees and professional groups or unions to foster the recognition of activities, professions, statuses, etc.

The notion of professionalization may alternately respond to a quest on the part of employees and “tradespeople” for further recognition or to the rise in demands addressed to employees or professionals by organizations, clienteles or users around efficiency challenges or work quality. These two movements do not necessarily converge, and rarely do they reflect the same expectations or practices. Lexical consensus quickly gives way to strong semantic dissent leading to discrepancies, misunderstandings and even tensions.

Now we observe that professionalization can refer to various phenomena. As a result, we may notice a plethora of analytical grids across research papers whose unity is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp. Therefore, professionalization is located at the crossroads of multiple disciplinary perspectives: the educational sciences, labor sciences, organizational sciences and political sciences. From a historic viewpoint, the concept of professionalization was first theoretically developed by sociology in English-speaking countries. This discipline asserted itself with the booming of the “sociology of professions” specialization, which studies the emergence and constitution of professional groups defending their position in the division of labor. In broad terms, the sociology of professions in English-speaking countries gradually evolved after the beginning of the 20th century. Sometimes taking a stand in the field of social and political debates, it intended to report on the way in which groups of individuals sharing the same activities organized themselves in free market contexts in view of obtaining an authorization to exercise, conquer a monopoly of exercise and regulate the professional territory conquered. A heated debate quickly crossed this field opposing functionalists to interactionists, while the former sought to elucidate the distinctive traits enabling and legitimizing the access to the status of profession (as opposed to the common condition of occupation), the latter rejected said distinction and attempted to explain why certain activities manage to be recognized as professions, arguing for the contingent nature of the difference. Other Weberian, neo-Weberian and Marxist approaches later rekindled this debate.

In countries with strong state presence and central regulation of activities (mainly the old continent countries), the collective challenges are not the same and the recognition dynamics of professional activities do not engage the same logics, nor do they follow the same avenues. Work is being carried out in Europe, on the one hand, in reaction to the approaches prevailing in English-speaking countries – deemed poorly valid for characterizing the vast majority of professional activities which do not fall within liberal professions – and, on the other hand, in continuity with an interactionist perspective by focusing on the internal and external dynamics of professional groups, or by developing a “conflictualist” approach to relationships between professional groups and institutions or organizations. In the wider field of sociology of work, notably in France, Belgium, etc., numerous “critical” papers have studied the development and use of the professionalization glossary by companies (the terms skill, performance, autonomy, responsibility, etc.) in connection with organization, regulation and work assessment challenges. Some have insisted on the idea that professionalization joins a growing call for skills to meet new work standards. The challenges could involve “making people swallow the pill of flexibility”. Permanent adaptability could lead to the individualization of assessment, tightening control over workers and reducing their autonomy at work. From this point of view, professionalization is also perceived as being at the service of committing employees to more flexible work contexts and making greater use of people’s subjective resources.

Recently, the field of training has also adopted the term, due to its massive introduction since the end of the 1990s into international, European and national discourses and texts governing professional training, whether initial or ongoing. Essentially, the work carried out there concerns the analysis of trends in the joint evolution of work and training, and the identification of new work-training articulation logics in so-called “professionalizing training” approaches, more closely related to changes in work and supposed to prepare the trainee for more targeted functions.

As we can see, the concept of professionalization has been subject to fragmented theoretical development, in different scientific fields at the origin of varied research traditions. However, work challenges, wider political and social challenges, challenges raised by professional groups and training challenges are closely intertwined when discussing professionalization.

To speak of professionalization in the field of training necessarily implies evoking the transformations of work and broader environments at the same time, seeking to understand the reciprocal transformations of individuals, collectives, organizations and environments. The general hypothesis could be the following: training and learning processes, as well as their transformations, can only be understood located in “space-time” (socio-political, organizational and collective environments (professional groups and local micro-collectives), individuals), themselves characterized by reciprocal transformations encouraged by inseparable challenges in the continuous change of organizations, collectives and individuals. By extension, in order to understand these dynamics, it is necessary to cross-research traditions that are rarely linked: for example, those centered on the transformations of legal regulations, the dynamics of organizations, the collective of workers, activity analyses, the metamorphosis of knowledge, the construction of the individuals’ experience and career path, the configuration of individual and collective identities, etc.

The ambition of this encyclopedic volume is to bring together and stimulate the dialogue between the available research papers addressing this concept in various fields. In fact, this insight cannot forgo the different “theoretical lenses” and the knowledge they produce because, as we mentioned earlier, the dynamics of professionalization are inseparable from ampler organizational, sociopolitical and collective dynamics. Furthermore, the knowledge produced by these approaches is today difficult to gather because it is dispersed across various scientific fields and traditions: the sociology of professions, work analysis (sociology of work and psycho-sociology of work), adult education and training, management sciences and political sciences, to mention the most important ones. As a corollary, this dispersion leads to low visibility and a difficulty for illuminating the field of professionalization. This ambition is reinforced by the idea that it is necessary to shed light on the challenges of professionalization for education and training by relating them to political and social challenges, organizational challenges, collective and individual challenges.

To satisfy these intentions, this encyclopedic volume will be organized into three parts which correspond to three main orientations or social significations of professionalization, supplemented in each case by texts penned by one or more specialists in the area concerned.

The first part will address the issue of professionalization probably in its oldest sense: the emergence, the constitution, the quest for recognition and the hoped for or effective institutionalization of professions. The challenge is to empirically grasp and theoretically model the professionalization paths of professional groups, of workers carrying out a given activity, seeking to have it recognized and valued, to gain autonomy in the regulation of their work with regard to their environment (clientele, organizations), or even to establish a monopoly of exercise ensuring them protection against competition from other professionals: which groups succeed in achieving this and how? What are the paths to professionalization? How can we account for and explain the considerable inequalities in this area? Showing that...