Unemployment Experts

• In Event: 2451 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 1. Creative and Knowledge Workers

Abstract

The future of professional work is uncertain. Globalization and technological change have undermined and reorganized many professional occupations while the rise of the knowledge economy has opened up jurisdictions for new kinds of professional claims. This paper sheds light on these transformations by examining the emergence of a new group of aspiring professionals: unemployment experts. Unemployment experts claim professional jurisdiction over the social problem of white-collar unemployment and precarious employment and offer various kinds of expert services to help workers manage their careers. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over a nine-month period, I identify three types of unemployment experts: Job Coaches, Self-help Gurus, and Skill-certifiers. I find that many aspiring unemployment experts are themselves refugees from dying professional occupations (such as Human Resources and middle-management) and are, paradoxically, claiming their own professional “fall from grace” as their new expert jurisdiction. Although unemployment experts only partially satisfy Andrew Abbott’s (1988) seminal theory of professionalization, they are still able to assert some kind of professional jurisdiction over unemployment. The conclusion considers the implications of these findings for the future of professional-expert work.

Author

• Patrick Sheehan, University of Texas at Austin