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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.

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This article investigates the impact of school to work transition support for young disabled adults. We specifically examine the claims of what we have termed the 'hurdle theory' of transition support, which dominates Norwegian disability research. The fundamental assumption of this theory is that there is a negative relationship between transition support and employment outcomes. We use a cross-sectional sample of 245 young disabled Norwegian adults to examine this assumption, and find that transition support in the form of labour market programme (LMP) participation is negatively associated with employment outcomes, even when we control for other significant background variables. However, due to limits in our data and the nonarbitrary nature of transition support, we cannot rule out that there might be other explanatory variables that account for this association. Therefore, we also point to other potential explanations of the negative association and research designs better suited to investigate these claims.

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Det må ikke kopieres fra denne publikasjonen ut over det som er tillatt etter bestemmelsene i "Lov om opphavsrett til åndsverk", "Lov om rett til fotografi" og "Avtale mellom staten og rettighetshavernes organisasjoner om kopiering av opphavsrettslig beskyttet verk i undervisningsvirksomhet".All rights reserved. This publication or part thereof may not be reproduced in any form without the written permission from the publisher.

Det må ikke kopieres fra denne publikasjonen ut over det som er tillatt etter bestemmelsene i "Lov om opphavsrett til åndsverk", "Lov om rett til fotografi" og "Avtale mellom staten og rettighetshavernes organisasjoner om kopiering av opphavsrettslig beskyttet verk i undervisningsvirksomhet".All rights reserved. This publication or part thereof may not be reproduced in any form without the written permission from the publisher.

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