Professionals' Market Immersion: Self Commodification and the Individualization of Professional Identity and Expertise

• In Event: 256 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 13. Professional Workers

Abstract

This paper sets a research agenda to explore the emergence of a new type of professional-market relations that we term "market immersion." In past decades, many professionals have been pushed or pulled into neoliberal markets, becoming self-employed. Back in markets, they seek self-commodification by defining individual uniqueness. Reviewing existing evidence, we argue that their efforts mark the loosening of the focus on professions as a "strong" group phenomenon that offers solid collective identities. Instead, professional identity is individualized and professionalism becomes a technology of self that is oriented towards the double tasks of "selfing markets" – defining a market niche along the contours of the professional's sense of self-uniqueness – and "marketizing self" through self-branding and related practices, many of which are pursued online. Bringing together various strings of sociological literature on contemporary professionals, the paper offers a conceptual scheme to capture this shift in professional focus from group to self and to further examine its expressions and implications.

Authors

• Galit Ailon, Bar-Ilan University

• Michal Pagis, Bar-Ilan University