Professions and power: A review of theories of professions and power

This chapter focuses on professionals who take on formal management roles in organisations and not on other forms of hybridisation. Hence, Freidson’s restratification thesis represents an important point of departure for current debates about hybrid professional management roles. Useful for thinking about how hybrid roles may vary between different levels of an organisational hierarchy is Causor and Exworthy’s taxonomy differentiating between three broad categories of hybrid professional manager: quasi-managerial practitioners, managing professionals, and general managers. Exworthy and Halford, for example, argues that for hybrid professionals, management assets are becoming more valued than traditional cultural assets acquired through education and characterized by personal expertise in a given body of practice. However, it is clear from Freidson’s account that this new class of professional managers also implies a shift in the nature of intra-professional relations. According to Martin and Learmonth, leadership offers a potentially attractive self-narrative for professionals, far more so than the term management.