Changing Worlds of Professional Work: New Markets, New Morals, New Models

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Work and Occupations invites papers for a special issue: Changing Worlds of Professional Work: New Markets, New Morals, New Models. Recent years have seen profound transformations in the landscape of professional work. Organizations that employ professionals are changing form and growing larger and more profitable. Markets for professional labor and services are globalizing; some clients and third-party payers are becoming more sophisticated. New groups of workers are making claims to professional status, and boundaries between professions are being renegotiated. The entry of women, ethnic and racial minorities, and other historically excluded groups has generated new interests, challenges, and pressures. Amidst these changes, professionals are rethinking the business of professional service, the nature of professional ethics, the role of regulation, and their identities as professionals. At the same time, sociologists are developing new perspectives on professional work. While the traditional sociology of professions has become quiescent, researchers in the broader fields of organizations, work, and inequality have begun to extend their questions and models to the professional context. This new work emphasizes the agency of actors at different levels-individual professionals and clients, employing and client firms, professional associations, and regulatory agencies-within their economic, technological, and cultural environments. The co-editors invite papers that seek to understand new empirical developments, offer new conceptual lenses, or employ new ideas and innovative approaches to push the boundaries of the sociology of professions and professional work. We welcome both theoretical contributions and empirical papers utilizing diverse methods. Review of manuscripts will commence on March 1, 2009.

The co-editors welcome and encourage inquiries: Elizabeth H. Gorman at egorman@virginia.edu or Rebecca L. Sandefur at sandefur@stanford.edu.