ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the nature of professionalism as it applies to professional communication, in the hope that it will lend direction to the teaching of professional communication in an international context. Professionalism incorporates a status achieved through acquiring knowledge and skills, a status that wields organizational and social power through the command of Discourses. Critical analyses of professional Discourses, frequently appealing to Foucault for authority, reveal the workings of this power and call on professionals to become aware of these mechanisms in their communication particularly with those outside their communities. The power relations constructed and maintained by medical and legal discourse, which have been widely analyzed, as value-neutral. Such practices formed the core of professional ethics, but ironically many are forbidden to the new professionals. The chapter argues that professional development is a question of the acquisition of knowledge and skills, not even of discourse skills, but of the building of a new, fluid identity.
