Introduction

The sociology of professions makes an important contribution to the study of stratification – more important than is often realised (Macdonald and Ritzer, 1988). A reason for this is that the professions started to appear in their present form contemporaneously with modern capitalist industrial society. As modern society is knowledgebased, professions as knowledge-based occupations, are an integral part of, for example, how the modern class system developed. A further reason is that the professional project has the market as one of its main themes, and it has become an aphorism that modern, industrial, capitalist society is a market society.

Structuralist accounts of disciplinarity define the discipline or perspective as a framework for understanding and interpreting information and experience, for judging the validity and adequacy of solutions to problems by defining what is acceptable, appropriate and useful. Structural views tend to focus not least on how human agency is constrained by influences external to the individual. In the structuralist scenario, disciplinary change is resisted unless it is in approved directions and influence appears unidirectional: the community is shaped by the discipline (Lattuca, 2001: 24).

In contrast a post-structuralist perspective directs attention to the community, portraying the discipline as a heterogeneous social system composed of individuals with varying commitments to ideas, beliefs and methodologies, and to interaction among those individuals. By focusing on the communal construction of meaning, the existence of multiple perspectives and the linkage of individual perspectives to social processes, post-structuralism replaces the idea of a structure with the more fluid concept of a space in which persons and ideas exist in relation to one another. Because meanings are seen as socially constructed, disciplines are sites of ontological, epistemological, methodological tensions, and these tensions animate structures such as subject matter and methods (Lattuca, 2001: 25). The structural perspective abstracts underlying frameworks that are believed to define a phenomenon, for example how a profession has evolved; or to define a belief system, for example how individuals construct their identity. A post-structural approach eschews abstraction and attends to the local and the particular, which are time and context bound.

Post-structuralist/social constructionism