Professional Authority and Corporate Capitalism

The paper addresses the question of the rise and fall of professional authority with regard to corporate capitalism. Corporate capitalism isn’t a new phenomenon, but during the last decades, in the shade of globalization, digitalization and financialization, the power of international corporate groups has risen enormously. Hence, it will be examined how professional knowledge and judgement relates to this environment. Beyond the aspects previously debated with regard to the relation between professions and organizations, huge corporations operate on the basis of a multi-level technocracy. Professionals have to deal with the logics of business administration, quantification and close monitoring, which further aggregate over the diverse organizational levels of large companies. Resulting from my empirical work on professionalism within such structures (e.g. media, banking, pharmaceutical industries) the effect of corporate capitalism on professional authority and in how far professionalism might still act as a counterbalance and systematic critique of technocracy will be discussed.