Reflections on a communication journey into professionalism and organizing

Abstract

In their 2007 article, ‘Considering “the professional” in communication studies: Implications for theory and research within and beyond the boundaries of organizational communication’, communication scholars George Cheney and Karen Ashcraft argued for a shift in the study of professionalism, professionals, and the professions towards accounting for performance and performativity. They also argued for the value of communication studies in making that shift. Their assertion seemed borne out by the facts: the last two decades have seen an upsurge in interest in professionalism and professionalization within communication and organizational studies (Meisenbach 2008b; Kuhn 2009; Cheney et al. 2010; Ganesh and McAllum 2012; Lammers, Atouba and Carlson 2013; McAllum 2013, 2018; Barbour and Gill 2017; Matte and Bencherki 2019; Fox et al. 2021, 2023). Yet, this period has also seen significant changes in how communication scholars theorize and empirically study professionalism. Enthusiasm for what could rightly be called the ‘professional turn’ in communication studies has been tempered by work that focuses on how privilege, power, and preferred meanings play out in established, emerging, and alternative professions (e.g. Ashcraft et al. 2012; Ashcraft 2013; Ferguson and Dougherty 2022; Wilhoit Larson, Linabary and Long 2022).

We wanted this special issue in JPO, to which we gave the title ‘Opening up the meanings of “the professional,” professional organizations, and professionalism in communication studies’, to help readers attend to both the light and the shadow: empirical and theoretical work that advances current scholarly conversations as well as work that questions and interrupts them. To tease out how communication studies interfaces with scholarship from other disciplines, we begin this introductory essay by laying out the key questions that formed the basis for the special issue, which we refined during an online post-conference of the International Communication Association. We next explain why communication studies, with its emphasis on the performance of professionalism, is well placed to open up interdisciplinary dialogue on professionals, professionalism, and the professions and show how the six contributions to the special issue¹ contribute to this endeavour. Finally, we reflect on how future work could open up new directions for scholarship on professionals, professionalism, and the professions in and from communication studies.

MAPPING OUT THE MEANINGS OF PROFESSIONALISM IN COMMUNICATION STUDIES

In 2021, we organized an online post-conference held after the International Communication Association’s yearly conference to take stock of the field as well as what had changed since the publication of Cheney and Ashcraft’s landmark essay. The conference convened sessions that spread across three days to account for differences in global time zones. Thirty-eight scholars from seven countries, including Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, the Philippines, the UK, and the USA, responded to the call to ‘stimulate dialogue about how communication scholarship can open up research on new forms of professionalism’, and we invited Karen Ashcraft to be our keynote speaker.

Building on Cheney and Ashcraft’s (2007) work on ‘the professional’, the post-conference aimed to foreground and celebrate the multi-faceted nature of professionalism as an ‘essentially contested concept’ (Gallie 1956), characterized by internal complexity, conceptual diversity, and reciprocal recognition of the concept’s contested character among contending parties. Rather than championing any one definition or perspective, we hoped that the post-conference would help us and participants to map out and contextualize the multiple, contested meanings of professionalism, particularly in novel or ‘non-standard’ contexts. In addition to the usual culprits such as medicine, law, and accounting, which represented the traditional view of professions as ‘knowledge-intensive’ (Brock 2023: 199), we wanted to attend to emerging professions and occupations that claimed or resisted professionalization (Brock, Leblebici and Muzio 2014; Fleming 2015; Anteby, Chan and DiBenigno 2016). Our interest in non-standard work and workers was well aligned with JPO’s interest in diverse organizational forms; indeed, Brock (2023) wrote of the end of ‘standard and predictable organizational structures’ (205) and the emergence of alternative organizational structures.

Concurrent with this search for recognition of a professional status by many practitioners, our call for papers highlighted a discursive shift from professionalism as a noun (‘being a professional’) to an adjective (‘being professional’). Indeed, others have previously argued that this second sense of professionalism focuses on how individuals carry out types of work with knowledge and skill—with a ‘professional spirit’ (Hodgson 2002: 805) or ‘conducting and constituting oneself in an appropriate manner’ (Fournier 1999: 287)—rather than limiting the ‘professions’ to particular types of work (Caza and Creary 2016). Wilensky’s (1964) doubts that the numerous occupational groups struggling for professional recognition would lead to the ‘professionalization of everyone’ seem unfounded in the current era when the obligation to ‘perform professionalism’ is becoming, as Ashcraft (2023) noted, ‘broadly compulsory’ (2). All occupations have become ‘professionish’.

Our third aim was to problematize the claim that professionalism is an aspirational concept (Nyawaga and Mitra 2024) or a ‘professional project’ (Brock 2023). Certainly, research has shown that occupational groups such as pilots (Ashcraft 2007), sustainability practitioners (Mitra and Buzzanell 2018), fundraisers (Meisenbach 2008a), and librarians (Garcia and Barbour 2018) have sought professional status, some with success. Other groups, like volunteer emergency medical technicians, who could well be categorized as blue-collar professionals, have rejected professionalism (McAllum 2018) or rejected others’ construction of their professionalism (Biss 2023). In light of these competing meanings and tensions, our call for papers for this JPO special issue asked questions, such as ‘How does professionalism act as a resource and as a constraint? Whose interests does professionalism serve? How might we disrupt contemporary meanings of professionalism?’ The first of these questions suggests that professionalism is not always helpful for professional workers (e.g. Harrington in Ashley et al. 2023).

The second and third questions implicitly position professionalism as exclusionary on multiple levels: (1) the kinds of jobs or occupations that are categorized and rewarded as high-status (what are the professions?); (2) how a role should or must be carried out (how does professionalization or the pressure to become or be professional play out?); and (3) the workers who are likely or not to fulfil these roles (who can or will be a professional?). Scholars have well documented the undeniably political effects of professionalism's exclusionary nature. For instance, writing about occupational closure, Brock (2023) cited the founding conceptualization of JPO (Brock, Leblebici and Muzio 2014) to emphasize the importance of recognizing that ‘closure is an inherently gendered, classed and racialized process’, adding that ‘certain professional practices and cultures affect different demographic groups’ (205). He added that calls for professional organizations and institutions to make top-down efforts to diversify and become more inclusive imply that the professions are indeed ‘closed’ entities in which expertise may be deployed and non-experts kept at bay. Similarly, in Ashley et al.’s (2023) agenda-setting JPO forum essay, the authors positioned inequality as a ‘grand challenge’, and Harrington answered the questions at the crux of this challenge, ‘how do professions contribute to inequality and how can they be part of the solution’ with the essential point that ‘it depends on whose behalf the professions are working’ (89).

However, even top-down efforts to diversify, including those advocated for by Ashley et al.’s (2023)JPO forum essay, still focus on professionalism as a structure, potentially missing or minimizing the processes by which the contested meanings of professionalism are enacted, negotiated, reified, contested, and so forth; in other words, top-down approaches miss the performance of professionalism. The field of communication studies has a distinctive advantage in correcting this shortcoming. When we shift the focus from experts (and the institutional apparatus that protects their status, autonomy, and authority) to expertise, as Ashcraft suggests in her contribution to this special issue, scholarly analysis needs to account for an entire network of actors, ideas, instruments, and forms of organizing that allow for successful—or failed—performances of expertise and understand that those performances rest on economies of difference. Economies of difference are distinctions among sorts of work, workers, and working that wield political power in that they implicate social structures and dictate how specialized expertise is and can be deployed and recognized. Economies of difference create and benefit from inequities.

The articles in this special issue offer empirical and conceptual windows into the contested and messy performance of professionalism, how it serves as a resource for some and a constraint for others, and how its contemporary meaning is potentially disrupted. Moreover, each contribution demonstrates the distinctive value of communication approaches for these questions. Communication approaches have analytical value in part because groups of professionals face particular sorts of communication puzzles. Much of their work involves communicating with clients and each other to put their distinctive knowledge into practice, and at the same time, they may speak because of their institutionalized, powerful, and special claims to knowledge. For instance, Brandhorst and Meisenbach (2024) find that corrections officers deploy communication strategies, that they align with professionalism, in order to protect themselves from prison inmates and the organization of their work. More specifically, corrections officers suppressed emotional display and practiced impersonalization, which the authors identify as corrections officers’ macrodiscursive constructions of what it means to do corrections work well. Similarly, Biss (2024) shows that the communicative facework of emergency medical services (EMS) providers shielded them from inappropriate requests and the difficult emotions of emergency response. She finds that such impression management as the performance of professionalism ought to be considered a communicative practice of emotional labour. Likewise, Nyawaga and Mitra document how Black professionals in frontline work deploy discourses of professionalism to navigate tensions stemming from minoritized racial identity and the precarity of frontline work. Their emotional labour consisted of bottling feelings of frustration while continually striving for excellence in their performance of a hegemonic Discourse of professionalism as white, male, and embodying class ideology. The community health workers in Golden and Benchercki’s (2024) study worked as liminal professionals who liaise between the communities they represent and the healthcare organizations aiming to serve these communities. Their success in translating between the two depended on their navigating a delicate and concurrent performance of two types of seemingly opposed knowledge: the specialized technical knowledge typically associated with professionals and their communicative, embodied knowledge of their community. Other articles explore the boundaries of professionalism. Writing about cyberinfrastructure (CI) professionals, Hayes, Kulkarni and Kee (2023) specify the storytelling central to the emergence of a profession: professionals’ career narratives that define the profession. More specifically, by exploring the narrative sensemaking of these professionals, the authors show how CI professionals’ communication practices stake out meanings of professionalism in their unique boundary-spanning positions. Finally, Coker (2024) describes how adventure workers challenge notions of professionalism by relying on discourses of meaningfulness of work. All the while, they also implicitly draw on discourses of professionalism, such as the division of private/work life, to demonstrate that they are devoted to their meaningful job. These studies focus on the communication work of these professionals and how their communicative practices constitute what is considered a legitimate performance of their professions, which is inherent to the professionalizing of their occupations.

In broad terms, these studies focus on questions defined from within, that is, the professions’ questions about the prevailing image of the occupation, and questions from without, or the questions that scholars ask of the professions. The questions defined from within explore professionalism with regard to ‘the profession’s’ preoccupations. These are questions, for instance, that focus on interprofessional dynamics, client relationships, the profession-organization interface, and the professions’ definition and defense of its boundaries and identity. Corrections officers’ communication involves questions about how to manage doing dangerous work well. EMS providers’ communication responds to questions about emotional labour, impression management, and facework. Cyberinfrastructure professionals communicate to define their professional story and to recruit others to the profession. Community health workers help clients by guiding them through complex healthcare organizations, and they help healthcare organizations by aligning their work with the lived needs of the community.

Ashcraft’s essay pushes us to question the professions and to pose questions ‘from without’ (see Table 1). She emphasizes the value of communication for understanding broader questions that apply to all professions lived in the day-to-day enactment of professional identity. Those questions include the erosion of elite status, professional misconduct, and professional contributions to social ills and inequities. Brandhorst and Meisenbach’s article also has relevance for questions about the construction of the profession that defines the work of corrections officers, what it means to do it well, and the professional ideals that define the available resources and constraints. Cyberinfrastructure inclusion efforts may be held back by the very conception of STEM as exclusive (Ashcraft 2024) as the occupation engages in the project of professionalizing defined especially in terms of individual characteristics as described by Hayes, Kulkarni and Kee (2023).

To seek professional status is to seek what Ashcraft terms ‘face value, that precious form of recognition by which something is obviously and immediately authorized, or credible ‘on its face’ (6). Face value depends on economies of difference that make professionals special in terms of Ashcraft’s suggested three ‘Fs’: the ‘figures’ of the profession, that is, its influential inhabitants; its ‘formations’, or the prevailing places and practices of the profession; and its ‘flows’, or the ongoing currents of activity by which figures and formations manifest and circulate. That is, to be a professional is to look a particular way, inhabit a particular sort of body, do particular things, and work in particular places. It is also to avoid the wrong look, the wrong body, the wrong tasks, and the wrong places. As Nyawaga and Mitra argue, ‘Black and Brown workers, comprising the bulk of frontline employees, must additionally navigate the hegemonic norms of mainstream professionalism, which are consistently biased toward male White subjectivities’ (1). Indeed, in their study, it is figures and flows that are foregrounded: the workers they studied ‘acted professionally’ to be considered as professionals despite those inequities: ‘Aspirations of being an essential expert motivated several participants to persevere and/or restrain themselves when facing indignities at work, as they told themselves that their eventual excellence would override these “temporary” problems’ (13).

In Brandhorst and Meisenbach’s article, economies of difference manifest in the ways that correctional officers (as figures) inhabit correctional facilities (a type of professional expertise formation), differentiating them from inmates. In other words, the flow of their situated performance of unemotional and guarded professionalism positions and stigmatizes inmates as mentally unfit while simultaneously excluding the possibility for correctional officers to acknowledge their own mental health challenges. In this instance, the profession does not seem to serve either party. Differentiation and exclusion function differently in Biss’s study of EMS providers. Here, the professional figures (EMS providers) use performances of professionalism to enact boundaries in their professional formation, that is, by delineating the acceptable professional practices from the unacceptable, they carve out their own professional niche.

In Golden and Bencherki’s article on community health workers (CHW), the face value of the CHW figure’s expertise lies precisely in their liminal position and ability to straddle the boundaries between two distinct formations: that of ‘the community’ and that of ‘the healthcare system’. In contrast, the adventure workers in Coker’s study have few formations to draw upon, making the performance of the ideal worker in the flow of their practice all the more central to differentiating themselves as professional, as figures that legitimize their occupation as professional because they do ‘real work’, unlike adventure hobbyists. The question of formation plays a central role as well in Hayes, Kulkarni and Kee’s study of cyberinfrastructure (CI) professionals. Through their sensemaking narratives about professional identity, these professionals distinguish the face value of their work as boundary spanners, at once different from and convergent with the ‘established professional standards of the established professions that overarch the community’ (195). That is, their particular CI formation is interwoven with the flows of the formations of other academic and scientific professions they serve.

AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH—IN AND FROM COMMUNICATION STUDIES

If we take seriously these arguments regarding the importance of the figures, formations, and flows of economies of difference and the contributions of the professions to persistent inequities (Ashley et al. 2023), JPO must open up, as it has in its various special issues and forums, our very understanding of the ‘professional’, professional organizations, and professionalism. It might be said that JPO has a stronger track record understanding the formations in the economies of difference enacted through the professions and the professional, but less the flows that constitute them or the figures (bodies) that inhabit them. In contrast, the articles in this special issue emphasize the figures (Who are the people that exercise influence in the difference economies?) and flows of professionalism (What are the performances that allow professionals to benefit from economies of difference?). Ashcraft’s third ‘F’, formations—the environments and assemblages of relations and practices that create networks of expertise—remains implicit. We encourage scholars to answer Ashcraft’s call to mobilize all three Fs, figures, flows, and formations, in their work.

To do so, they need to address questions of inequality and exclusion in ways that (1) break open—or break apart—the notion of ‘the’ professional and that (2) problematize organizational or institutional control over what can be labelled professional. The first intuition allows us to include a whole range of other beings who inhabit the difference economy: What would analysis of professionalism’s exclusionary tendencies and the solutions that could overcome and transform them look like if we were to consider how an intertwined network of human and non-human actors participate in excluding certain types of experts? The contexts where this question is relevant are many, but, here, we focus on the relationships between artificial intelligence, automation, and professional work. How will the automation of work and the work of automation form and affect professions and professionals in the future? The principal concern of existing knowledge-intensive professions as they consider these new technologies may be understood as threatening or bolstering currently efficacious (for them) economies of difference. Professionals who are socially recognized as such want the economy of difference on which the profession rests to hold, not because they worry that their work tasks will be replaced but that what differentiates their work will be obviated. Our second emphasis concerns the loss of control of boundaries that enable members of the professions to establish, protect, and self-critique their enactment of expertise. The post-industrial economy allows often unqualified, unidentifiable others to assail and contest the economy of difference. In what we call the ‘Uber world’, for instance, online reviews of almost everything and everyone mean that those outside of the profession decide.

Taken together these insights underscore that future work in JPO should encourage questions inside the professions on the professions’ terms, but also questions about the nature of the professions themselves–questions from outside. Opening up will require a careful consideration of work heretofore not considered professional or workers not considered professionals because of the need to understand professionalism. Communication approaches can make a distinctive and valuable contribution to that project of opening up. As we join the JPO community in imagining the next ten years of the Journal, JPO2, we look forward to pushing this shift towards the study of professionalism and organizing as well as professions and organization with the renewed urgency and possibility in understanding economies of difference.

REFERENCES

Footnotes