Professionalism as a cultural form: Knowledge, craft, and moral agency

Spillman, Lyn; Brophy, Sorcha A.

doi:10.1093/jpo/joy007

Cited by 14 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…However, instead of attempting to answer how family physicians might increase their relative power, I investigate the quality of this power (Reich 2012;Timmermans and Kolker 2004), exploring how family physicians construct arguments about their collective action in light of the threats facing their specialty. Recent reexaminations of professional associations have attended to the important cultural functions performed by these organizations (Aldrich 2018;Spillman 2012Spillman , 2018Spillman and Brophy 2018). Professional associations are sites of meaning making, which "routinely produce cognitive categories and practices" for members (Spillman 2012: 135).…”

Section: Strategically Positioning the Specialty Of Family Medicinementioning

confidence: 99%

Health or Politics? Organizational Maintenance in the AAFP

Brophy

2018

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law

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In recent years, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has debated and developed organizational stances on issues as varied as nuclear disarmament, gay marriage, policing, and climate change. This article considers the relationship of "political" policies to the ongoing maintenance of this professional association over time. The author describes transitions in the organization's policies from broad, neutral statements to more explicitly politicized social policy statements and then discusses debates around the establishment of an organizational policy on same-gender marriage. Results indicate that members use concerns about the maintenance of the organization over time as a lingua franca during debates. However, while members routinely interpret policy in terms of its relationship to the maintenance of the organization, they articulate conflicting visions of maintenance, with those in favor of the policies describing maintenance primarily in terms of external legitimacy and those in opposition describing maintenance primarily in terms of internal cohesion.

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Section: Strategically Positioning the Specialty Of Family Medicinementioning

confidence: 99%

Health or Politics? Organizational Maintenance in the AAFP

Brophy

2018

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law

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“…In the case of physician associations in particular, we would add to this list the issuing of public health guidance. Study of these activities is important not only because of their role in maintaining professional standards but also because they provide members with what Lyn Spillman has referred to as vocabularies of motive, the cognitive resources to understand their interested action as imbued with moral significance (Spillman 2012;Spillman and Brophy 2018).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to “Recontextualizing Physician Associations: Revisiting Context, Scope, Methodology”

Brophy

Sriram

2021

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law

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Physician associations, in particular the American Medical Association (AMA), were long seen as a dominant force in health policy, using their symbolic power, access to politicians, financial resources, and collective strength to shape policy in their interest. 1 However, with the rise of other policy actors (such as the hospital, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries) and tectonic shifts in the political economy of the health sectors of many countries, researchers have argued that the power of physicians has diminished, and that they are less relevant to policy change (Peterson 2001;Stevens 2001;Stone 1998). In this special section, we caution against overstating the loss of physicians' collective power (Timmermans and Berg 2003;Timmermans and Oh 2010) and draw attention to a casualty of this assumption-the scholarly neglect of physician associations. We argue that the techniques used by physician associations to affect policy change have evolved significantly, and that it is imperative to account for the shift of physician influence to new arenas and platforms. We also reconsider the distribution of power in organized medicine, highlighting the significant power held by physician associations that have largely 1. In this article we use the term physician associations, recognizing the overlap of terms used to describe professional associations that represent medical doctors-particularly physician associations, medical associations/societies, and doctor associations. We elect to refer to physician associations rather than medical associations/societies, as the latter term suggests concern for a broad set of medical stakeholders when, in fact, these associations advance physician interests over other stakeholders. We selected the term physician over doctor because of the widespread usage of the term physician in North America. We invite further scrutiny of the use of these terms, including which stakeholders can lay claim to the oversight of medicine and the implications of using particular terms on the relative power of actors in the health sector.

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“…Studies of tactics deployed by these practitioners highlight the continuous struggle they face to implement CSR (Mitra & Buzzanell, 2017), in spite of corporate insiders' skepticism (Girschik, 2020;Wickert & de Bakker, 2018;. Spillman and Brophy (2018) suggest that scholars should approach professionalism as a discourse imbued with "cultural claim-making about work" (p. 155). These claims are not static (Evetts, 2011), but they remain crucial for any new group of aspiring professionals who needs to produce a coherent normative discourse to justify why their judgment should be trusted more, about a given set of issues, than that of others.…”

Section: A Rise Of Csr Practitioners Fraught With Tensionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To address this question, we combine insights from studies of CSR practitioners (Risi & Wickert, 2017; Tams & Marshall, 2011), “third-wave” studies about new forms of professionalism (Anteby et al, 2016), including issue professionalism (Henriksen & Seabrooke, 2016; Spillman & Brophy, 2018), and key concepts from the economies of worth framework (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991/2006; Cloutier et al, 2017). Because the economies of worth theory focus on how actors justify their decision or action on moral grounds and recognize the pluralism of moral worlds (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999), it can help identify how multiple and potentially competing “moral worlds” are used by CSR practitioners to justify their claims of professionalism and how such moral pluralism fuels tensions between competing claims.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Moral Relationality of Professionalism Discourses: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility Practitioners in South Korea

et al. 2021

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Building a coherent discourse on professionalism is a challenge for corporate social responsibility (CSR) practitioners, as there is not yet an established knowledge basis for CSR, and CSR is a contested notion that covers a wide variety of issues and moral foundations. Relying on insights from the literature on micro-CSR, new professionalism, and Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991/2006) economies of worth framework, we examine the discourses of 56 CSR practitioners in South Korea on their claimed professionalism. Our analysis delineates four distinct discourses of CSR professionalism— strategic corporate giving, social innovation, risk management, and sustainability transition—that are derived from a plurality of more or less compatible moral foundations whose partial overlaps and tensions we document in a systematic manner. Our results portray these practitioners as compromise makers who selectively combine morally distant justifications to build their own specific professionalism discourse, with the aim to advance CSR within and across organizations. By uncovering the moral relationality connecting these discourses, our findings show that moral pluralism is a double-edged sword that can not only bolster the justification of CSR professionalism but also threaten collective professionalism at the field level. Overall, our study suggests paying more attention to the moral relationality and tensions that underlie professional fields.

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Professionalism as a cultural form: Knowledge, craft, and moral agency

Cited by 14 publications

References 23 publications

Health or Politics? Organizational Maintenance in the AAFP

Health or Politics? Organizational Maintenance in the AAFP

Introduction to “Recontextualizing Physician Associations: Revisiting Context, Scope, Methodology”

The Moral Relationality of Professionalism Discourses: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility Practitioners in South Korea

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