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Professional Work

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Current challenges to the legitimacy of expert knowledge has caused professional control over knowledge, autonomy at work, orientation toward public service, and social status to have declined. In...
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  • 15 October 2020
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The professions have undergone massive changes in recent decades, as globalization, information technology, bureaucratization and market competition have begun to envelop even the most prestigious occupations in contemporary societies. Ironically, at a time when expert knowledge has grown increasingly important, the 'golden age' of the professions has receded into the past. Professional autonomy, authority, and ethics are all under siege, and even their claims to exclusive control of knowledge face challenges on multiple fronts.

Volume 34 of Research in the Sociology of Work explores how the professions are faring in this changed world, shedding new light on a field that has long been at the center of social science thinking about the economy, the state, and social order. Chapters in this volume explore a series of questions that are vital to modern life, such as:

  • How has increased control by employers and clients altered the experience of work for professionals?
  • What are the new bases of professional status?
  • How are underrepresented groups faring within the professions?
  • How do professionals respond to precarity and unemployment?
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Price: $133.99
Pages: 264
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Imprint: Emerald Publishing Limited
Series: Research in the Sociology of Work
Publication Date: 15 October 2020
ISBN: 9781800432116
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Workplace Culture, Society & culture: general, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economic Conditions, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination
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Elizabeth H. Gorman is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. Her research interests focus on gender and race-based workplace inequality and on professional and expert work. 

Steven P. Vallas is Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University in Boston. His research is concerned with the transformation of work, struggles over new technologies, and responses to the demands of the new economy.
Chapter 1: Introduction; Elizabeth Gorman and Steven Vallas 
Thematic Papers 
Chapter 2: Professional Engagement in Articulation Work: Implications for Experiences of Clinical and Workplace Autonomy; Jane S. VanHeuvelen 
Chapter 3: The Intimate Dance of Networking: A Comparative Study of the Emotional Labors of Young American and Danish Jobseekers; Sabina Pultz and Ofer Sharone 
Chapter 4: Teaching on Contract: Job Satisfaction Among Non-Tenure-Track Faculty; Elizabeth Klainot-Hess Chapter 5: Education and Referrals: Parallel Mechanisms of White and Asian Hiring Advantage in a Silicon Valley High Technology Firm; Koji Chavez 
Chapter 6: Skill Development Practices and Racial-Ethnic Diversity in Elite Professional Firms; Elizabeth H. Gorman and Fiona M. Kay 
Chapter 7: Professional Impurities; Sida Liu 
Chapter 8: Measured Success: Knowledge, Power, and Inequality in the Professional Work of Evaluation; Elisa Martínez, Laurel Smith-Doerr, Timothy Sacco 
Papers at Large 
Chapter 9: Labor, Lifestyle, and the “Ladies Who Lunch”: Work and Worth Among Elite Stay at Home Mothers; Jussara do Santos Raxlen and Rachel Sherman 
Chapter 10:Manufacturing Discontent: The Labor Process, Job Insecurity and the Making of “Good” and “Bad” Workers; Martha Crowley, Julianne Payne, and Earl Kennedy