ABSTRACT
Three central features of the ideology of professionalism are a specialist knowledge-base, autonomy and service. Each has been significantly affected by social and cultural changes over the last two decades. Expansion of the knowledge base has led to increasing specialism within many professions and to increasing numbers of professions, so that a single client needing a service, for example, in health care or construction, may encounter both several specialisms within the same profession e.g., medicine or engineering, and members of several different professions. The result is not only increased complexity for the client but a web of intraprofessional and interprofessional relationships in which mutual accountabilities are easily obscured.
