The Crisis in Professionalism and the Need for a Normative Approach

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the crisis in professionalism from a historical and conceptual point of view. It describes the development of professional practices as part of the process of modernization (i.e., the rationalization of working processes and the increasing division and specialization of labor). This process was successful, but has also been accompanied by tendencies to bureaucracy, alienation, meaninglessness, and dehumanization. The chapter describes a set of desiderata for a conceptual framework that successfully avoids these pitfalls and sketches how a so-called normative practice approach could provide a conceptual and normative framework that enables professionals to disentangle and remedy the tensions and ambivalences within their professional practices.