The New-Petty-Embourgeoisment of Professionals in the Age of Globalization

Ever expanding global corporate capitalism has all-encompassing influences; professions also fall within its explanandum domain. Professions once considered liberal and noble are being transformed into intellectual workers of the corporate sector of all kinds of societies. Professional expertise and intellectual capacities are being utilized for commerce and maximization of profit rather than in the interest of the client and the public. This applies to scientists, doctors and lawyers who carry out the function of corporate capital on the one hand and perform the task of labour by producing the surplus. The growth of the knowledge economy world over has created vast opportunities for this kind and concomitant growth of the new middle class consisting professionals. A study of Indian professionals, working in various kinds of corporate sectors operating in different countries, suggests that they are undergoing the process of new-petty-embourgeoisment. The autonomy of the new middle class is grounded in the specialized professional knowledge; however, they work like intellectual white-collars and able to exercise lesser degree of professional independence. Furthermore, the ascendancy of new technology in all spheres of work organization has brought about a change in formal organizational relations which leads to work autonomy a class character of the new middle class, but at the same time it leads to 'diskilling'. It has been found that more homogenous life chances and life style are on rise among the professional middle class at the global level. It can be argued that they are moving from the old petty bourgeois nature and location to the new petty bourgeois class location as also subjective identity.