Professional Status, Knowledge and Control: Inequality, Trust and Competition in Work Settings

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Inequality in the Workplace II

Abstract

Workers in different occupations enjoy varying levels of control over their work. The level of professional status or lack thereof is used to explain why. Professionalization becomes an important marker for determining the kinds of work that are of lower or higher status.
How does the perceived status of the worker become a major determining factor over the level of control that the worker would have over that work? Why are some kinds of workers subject to closer supervision than other kinds of workers? And when does this close supervision occur?
This paper explores the reasons for the differences in supervision and control over work. Control over work has undergone important changes because 1) work increasingly takes place in larger organizations, 2) organizations must respond to external conflicts and pressure that result from disappointing outputs as judged by the market, and 3) perceptions of knowledge and who can possess and apply it can shift.
In this paper, I analyze auto workers and doctors and their positions on opposite ends of the control-over-work continuum and then apply the analysis to teachers. I consider the roles that the competing logics of the professions, the bureaucracy and the market play in generating and managing conflict and competition within and outside of the organization, the role that knowledge plays as the focus of control and intraorganizational competition between the technical core and managerial level, and the limits of rationality of the organization in the resultant inability to manage irrational affective responses such as trust.

Author

• Mildred Enid Rey, University of Chicago