ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the material practices can function as governing regimes in the ways that they influence professional's activity and responsibilities. Social Responsibility (SR) may have begun as a simple set of altruistic ideals, but in professional work and organisations it has proliferated into a range of conflicting sociomaterial assemblages. Sources and motivations driving the new call for 'citizen professionals' deserve closer scrutiny. The invocations of SR that now circulate in policy and curricula targeting professionals bear a rather close relation to the corporate SR practice regimes that have become pervasive among private and public organisations. Thus individual professionals and their organisations are exhorted to find meaningful involvement in issues such as youth unemployment, climate change, HIV/Aids, food security and so forth. In most work organisations, professionals must walk tightropes across contested terrain: they do not have the luxury of university-based educators and researchers who can pronounce radical visions of democratic capitalism and global human development from safe armchairs.
