Who Counts As Professional? Professionalism, Expertise, and the Changing Politics of Authority

Debates on the transformation of professions have recently been framed through the contrast between professionalism and expertise. The sociology of professions has shown how occupational groups construct authority through credentialing, jurisdictional claims, closure, collective organization, and institutional recognition. The sociology of expertise has broadened the focus to fluid, hybrid, and networked forms of knowledge, exceeding established boundaries.

This session starts from the assumption that both perspectives remain necessary, but neither is sufficient. Traditional approaches remain crucial for understanding how occupational authority is institutionalized and defended. Expertise-centred approaches are equally important for capturing distributed, interdisciplinary, organizationally mediated, and technologically supported knowledge claims. Yet contemporary transformations require us to move beyond a simple opposition between professionalism and expertise.

We propose professional legitimacy as an analytical bridge. Rather than asking only whether an occupational group qualifies as a profession, or whether a form of knowledge can be treated as expertise, the session invites contributors to examine how workers, occupational groups, organizations, and expert networks acquire, maintain, contest, or lose legitimacy. The acquisition of professional legitimacy can be understood as a situated process through which claims to competence, authority, autonomy, trustworthiness, and social value are made credible before states, markets, organizations, users, clients, publics, and professional groups.

The session welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions on established or emerging professions, weakly institutionalized groups, expert networks, and hybrid fields. We are especially interested in papers showing how authority is reshaped by technological change, marketization, managerialism, public distrust, geopolitical inequality, ecological crisis, and changing knowledge production.