Professional knowledge and the question of identity: an analytical framework

Across a range of professions, but also in university research, traditional assumptions about the production and acquisition of knowledge are being challenged by increasingly global economic and political forces (Freidson 2001). This, of course, has always been true up to a point – but it is the extent and form of this questioning that is new. This includes its links with political and economic developments, the challenge to the idea that professions have a distinctive knowledge base, and even the very idea of a distinct group of occupations being set apart as professions.