ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the new professionals: the "postmodern" "cultural and social specialists" who serve as the "carriers of new values and a new politics" and help elaborate what Anthony Giddens has called the "reflexive project of the self". In an "exclusively collegiate organization," "the authority of a group of professional colleagues is undivided by bureaucracy". The nature of white-collar work has changed since Weber's day, which has affected the structure of organizational domination. Formal organizations exercise leverage on professionals and dictate the scope of their activity by controlling, or even by creating, the collegially managed spaces within which the specialists flourish. Unlike Prussian bureaucracies, California-style bureaucracies achieve their goals by means of "a variety of informal, often contradictory forms, entirely independent of traditional formal rationality". Although affirmative action programs supposedly bring minorities and nonminorities together, this can occur only under the paternalistic supervision of bureaucratic regulation and legal authority.
