Responding to recent calls for more context and history in studying (semi-)professionals in the public sector, this article examines the emergence of hybrid professional roles along with large-scale reforms of Dutch healthcare and education since 1965. Using a theoretical framework based on public management literature and key professional attributes, the article shows how hybrid role expectations are developed by accumulation rather than replacement of successive reform models. Within a single national context, it also highlights considerable sectoral variation in how reform affects professionals' roles, suggesting a complex mutual relationship between reform and professions rather than a one-sided policy impact.

This paper investigates the changed roles and strategies of professionals in a context of hybrid welfare state reform. This context exposes public professionals to market regulation and rationalization (new public management), and simultaneously expects them to work across professional borders to co-produce public services together with their clients, colleagues and other stakeholders (new public governance). Adopting a comparative perspective, we studied different types of professionals for their views on the implications of this reform mix on their work. Hence, we investigate ‘strategy’ at the macro level of public sector reform and at the micro level of professionals’ responses. The study is based on literature and policy documents, participatory observations and especially (group) interviews with professionals across Dutch hospitals, secondary schools and local agencies for welfare, care or housing. We found that professionals across these sectors, despite their different backgrounds and status, meet highly similar challenges and tensions related to welfare state reform. Moreover, we show that these professionals are not simply passive ‘victims’ of the hybrid context of professionalism, but develop own coping strategies to deal with tensions between different reform principles. The study contributes to understanding new professional roles and coping strategies in welfare state reform, in a context of changing relationships between professions and society.

Against a background of public management reform strengthening managerialism, this study examines the professional identity of secondary school teachers in the Netherlands. It uses the Good Work framework of excellence, ethics and engagement to explore what teachers think they should doself-imageversus what they dorole. It finds that managerial reforms in secondary education enhance a discrepancy between these two sides of teachers' identity. The study discovers three strategies teachers employ to navigate the emerging tensions. These findings contribute to our understanding of how public management reform plays out in both teachers' beliefs and practices.