ABSTRACT
Few professionals talk as much about being professionals as those whose professional stature is in doubt.
(F. Katz, in A. Etzioni, The Semi-professions and their Organisation. Teachers, Nurses, Social Workers, 1969)
Thus far, we have approached the globalization of educational discourses in two different ways. The first has been to deconstruct a master-frame of the postmodern, concluding that the death of the meta-narratives is accompanied by the birth of the hypernarratives, of which more will be said later. The second is a related but smaller frame, a subject-specific one, but which also relies for its scientificity on making similar epistemological and statistical moves in the ecumene of the internationally mediated ‘pregnant teenager’. But the world of the global is not just a matter of outcomes and curricula. It is also a world of actors. It is to the globalized nature of professional identities that we now turn, looking at the ways that accountability drives and frames have reconstructed them. We argue that these reconstructions are not unilateral, and that they are resisted, played at, rejected as well as accommodated, and even welcomed. Our focus will be on those contested spaces where issues of identity are fought over by the professional.
