ABSTRACT
The natural and the technical sciences are today increasingly pooled as biotechnology now termed life science by EU and as such, marketed on a global scale. Global markets rather than national states are likely to be the future masters of such professions. To the extent to which professional ‘closures’ arise as ‘sources of power’, with capacities to control and/or regulate both market and public, professions are potentially forming new globally operating ruling classes. Globalisation has emerged as the new topical issue in the social sciences in the last decade. Globalisation, in its many different usage, may thus have salutary effects on the social science community. It has the power to integrate widely separate discourses and to shape a common social scientific agenda. Instead of breaking up the capitalist class system, the major professions had in fact strengthened their source of power. The ‘new class project’ offered an understanding of the radical potentials of professional power.
