ABSTRACT
In this chapter the concept of professionalisation is deconstructed. An examination is presented of how this relates to governments’ imposition of professionalisation on policing, probation, the prison service, and the de-regulating tendencies applied to the Law. Chan (1999) noted that professionalism means different things to different people at different times and serves different purposes so we need to distinguish between the terms profession, professional, professionalism, and professionalisation.
The Law is considered one of the traditional professions, by which is meant an acknowledged group enjoying a high level of social prestige whose claims rest on prolonged study of a recognised corpus of knowledge, whose practitioners are registered, and whose conduct is governed by a code of ethics regulated through a learned body. Fournier (2000, p. 76) suggests a key distinguishing factor is that services are rendered not sold, thus standing outside the market and concerned with the public good.
Professional means having a high degree of skill, as in professional tennis player or actor. It is the opposite of amateur and provides recognition of being engaged, often full-time, as the means of earning a living.
Professionalism, according to Mawby and Worrell (2013, p. 144), involves some form of recognised qualification, the holding of expertise in a recognised field of knowledge, and autonomy, i.e. recognition of the right to intervene in the world.
Professionalisation is the project of developing a body of knowledge that supports practice through an evidence base and a licencing and credentialing of practitioners (MacDonald, 1995). Professionalisation may be an aspiration from within an occupation, often as a result of an external challenge or imposed on it from outside.
This chapter discusses these concepts and makes a link with some of issues mentioned in Chapter 2 on occupational culture and the creation of stress described in Chapter 14. We delineate some of the tensions between organisational and occupational professionalisation as applied to the police, probation, and the prison service. As explained above, we make a distinction between these groupings within criminal justice, and which may be thought of as ‘semi professions’, and the Law which enjoys a status accorded to a traditional profession. The Law has not been immune from these pressures, but paradoxically the direction of change is perceived by some to be in effect a process of de-professionalisation.