The Professional as Prophet: The social magic of professional knowledge

The concept of ‘profession’ is typically linked to the strength derived from its neutrality and the specialised knowledge and skills the professional is expected to possess, supported by a self-affirmative narrative of the group’s capabilities and merits. Professions have become powerful forces for conceptualisation both the world of their own, that of the general public and caring out solutions for a wide range of human challenges. This makes it obvious to examine the forms of social dominance that come with professionalisation. The inquiries are fundamentally preoccupied with the inherent contradiction between person and profession, and between the arbitrariness of subjectivity and the universalised concern of a profession. The presentation follows three steps. 1) The will of a profession comes with a false neutrality and by that with a social dominance, working explicitly as well as implicitly. 2) Goffman and Bourdieu then show how this dominance works, rooted in professional practice itself, as they point to a threshold separating the logic of theory from the logics of moral practices of professions. This all points to breaks in the knowledge-power-legitimacy chain of professions. 3) The concern of social dominance and that of the knowledge-power-legitimacy chain is now united in the symbolic order of prophecies. Evidence suggests that professions provide a surplus of meaning by virtue of some prophecies they carry with them. This symbolic resource creates an ambiguity between professional neutrality and determining the personal morale of prophecies, with consequences for both knowledge of and about professions.