Professional Talk: Discursive Approaches to Professions and Social Change

This session invites contributions that explore professions through the lens of discourse. Rather than asking what professions are, or whether particular occupations meet predefined criteria of professional status, the session focuses on how professionalism is talked about, mobilized, contested, and transformed in situated social contexts.

Discursive approaches have opened important avenues in the sociology of professions. They invite us to study professionalism not only as an institutional form or occupational attribute, but also as a set of meanings, narratives, vocabularies, classifications, and rhetorical resources through which actors make sense of their work and position themselves in relation to others. Professional discourse may operate as a means of occupational mobilization, a device of organizational control, a resource for identity work, or a tool for reshaping boundaries between occupations, organizations, clients, users, markets, and the state.

The session welcomes theoretical and empirical papers addressing established, emerging, hybrid, fragmented, or weakly institutionalized professions. Contributions may examine professional talk in everyday work; rhetorical strategies in professional projects; discursive boundary work between occupations; identity narratives among professionals; organizational and managerial uses of professionalism; digital and platform-mediated repertoires of professionalism; or the role of professional discourse in activism, public controversies, and institutional change.

By foregrounding discourse, the session aims to move beyond static definitions of professions and to examine professionalism as a practical, symbolic, and contested accomplishment through which professional worlds are continuously made, unmade, and remade.