5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Professions are facing an unprecedented crisis characterized by labor shortages, high turnover rates, career shifts, increasing rates of burnout, and absenteeism at work. This situation is seen by many scholars as a crisis of meaning at work, where professionals no longer seem to find in work what motivated their professional choice. An increasingly significant gap appears to be forming between the aspirations of professionals and their work realities, redefining professional values, identity, and the place of certain knowledge. Studies show that professionals are under considerable pressure from institutions, service users, and professions, which can create tensions with professional knowledge and ethos, potentially affecting the quality of services provided. This raises the question of the valorization and hierarchy of certain types of profesionnal knowledge over others, as well as the competition between different type of knowledge. We are interested in how professionals, individually or collectively, deal with these issues, the impacts on service recipients, and the responses provided by organizations. For example, how are professional practices being redefined? What is the effect on work engagement? What strategies or resistance mechanisms are employed by professionals? How can organizations promote more democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive participation of professionals to support work engagement and the provision of quality services? We are interested in proposals concerning empirical studies on one or more professional groups, as well as more theoretical proposals on the subject.