ABSTRACT
It is roughly twenty years since the paper ‘Professionalism as enterprise: Service class politics and the redefinition of professionalism’ was published in Sociology and, unsurprisingly, much has altered. This chapter examines the manner in which professional ideology chops and changes with wider social re-composition. It challenged the idea that professionals were simply trusted as members of the service class to argue that this ‘trust’ was always contingent on wider class struggles. The chapter argues that the issue of trust and social recomposition meant the service class might fracture along the lines of commercialised or social service professionalism. Organisations have innovated in remarkable ways and this has had important impacts on how economies develop. Knowledge movement exploded in the 1980s and 1990s and, while initially concentrated in low skilled manufacturing, it is spreading its tentacles to more skilled areas. Systems integrators are the organising brains of a dispersed production system which produces in-house, off-shore or sub-contracted work.
