The making of ‘professional amateurs’

Abstract

The aim of this article is, through empirical material from Norway, to grasp a particular form of non-profit professionalization spurred by the incorporation of policies of service user involvement in health care and in social services. By drawing on perspectives from the research on professionalization, our ambition is to increase the understanding of the nature of this form of professionalization, how it differs from other kinds of professionalization in the non-profit sector and why it achieves its distinctive features. We denote the professionalization of service users’ work as representatives, as the making of ‘professional amateurs’ to capture its paradoxical nature – that while the process of professionalization resembles occupational professionalization, the voluntary workers who are becoming professionalized are still amateurs. It is professionalization in the form of increasing the competence of the voluntary workers, not professionalization through transforming voluntary work tasks into occupations and paid employment. It is a form of competence fundamentally resting on personal experience with the issues with which the work is concerned, not a competence to be achieved solely through education and professional training.