Network D: Professions and Expertise

Professions and experts have long held a central role in both the economy and society, and today, they remain as vital as ever. In particular, they play a crucial role in addressing key socio-economic concerns of our time, such as climate change, corporate governance, ageing populations, and trade regulation.

There are some distinctive features of the contemporary roles of professions, professionals, and experts. The meanings of the terms “profession” and “professional” have evolved. Alongside the traditional professions, such as accountancy, architecture, law, and medicine, a range of new professions has emerged. These new professions, like management consultancy and project management, rely on discourses of expertise, ethics, and client service to establish their positions in the market and to legitimize their claims to issues traditionally under the jurisdiction of the old professions. Professionals now frequently work in large, often multinational, organizations that shape discourses and identities. Additionally, technology is fundamentally disrupting the professions, most recently through the impact of artificial intelligence.

The status of professions has also been challenged. Professions are increasingly operating within divisions of labor alongside other occupational groups with whom they cooperate and compete. Claims to expertise, rather than claims to being a profession, have become more important. Individuals and groups work relationally to develop expertise claims within networked ecologies. From expertise in autism to expertise in monetary policy, wealth management, and environmental protection, jurisdiction over domains is being claimed in ever-more diverse ways.

Through the Professions and Expertise Network, we aim to develop critical analysis of the dynamics of professions and expertise. In particular, we are interested in how professions, professionals, and experts operate at the heart of global socio-economic agendas. The network welcomes contributions from various intellectual traditions and disciplines, including sociology, political science, economics, geography, anthropology, and management studies.

Network D Organizers

University of Western Ontario

Tracey L. Adams

Lancaster University Management School

James Faulconbridge

University of Virginia

Elizabeth Gorman

University of Western Ontario

Tracey L. Adams

Tracey L. Adams is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her grant-funded research focuses on professional work and professional regulation in Canada and internationally.  One primary branch of research examines intersectional inequalities at work. A second focuses on the changing nature and organization of professional work and expertise. A third research area traces changes in professional regulation and state-profession relations across time and place.  Tracey’s work has been featured in Work, Employment & Society, Social Science & Medicine and the Journal of Professions and Organization, among other journals. Recent books include the award-winning, Regulating Professions (University of Toronto Press, 2018), and the co-edited Gender, Age and Inequality in the Professions (with Marta Choroszewicz, Routledge, 2019).

Lancaster University Management School

James Faulconbridge

James Faulconbridge is Professor of Transnational Management in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology at Lancaster University Management School, UK. His research focuses upon the way processes of globalization and financialization have transformed the professions and professional service firms, as well as the way knowledge and practice move internationally within and between professional organizations. James has published widely in journals including Environment and Planning A, The Journal of Economic Geography, Economic Geography, Organization Studies and Work, Employment and Society. He has co-authored the book The Globalization of Advertising (Routledge) and edited the book International Business Travel in the Global Economy (Ashgate).

University of Virginia

Elizabeth Gorman

Elizabeth Gorman is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, where she teaches courses on work, gender, organizations, and sociology of law.  Her research interests focus on gender- and race-based workplace inequality and on professional and expert work.  Her research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and a number of other journals. Dr. Gorman’s current project examines the increasing role of the state in the regulation of professional misconduct in the legal and accounting professions.  She holds a JD from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Harvard University.  She is currently one of the co-organizers of SASE’s Network D: Professions and Professionals in a Globalizing World, and a Council member for the American Sociological Association’s Section on the Sociology of Law.

SASE Networks

A: Community, Democracy, and Organizations

This network focuses on the moral or values-based underpinnings of human thought, practices, and institutions that comprise civil societies, particularly as they relate to the participatory, collectivist, and democratic aspirations of organizations, markets, and other spaces of collaboration and contestation.

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B: Globalization and Socio-Economic Development

This network considers how, at a time of a polycrisis, domestic, transnational, and international institutions and markets influence the contours of developmental opportunities in the global economy and beyond.

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C: Gender, Work & Family

This network focuses on exploring the current state, and the changes in institutions concerned with gender and family roles and workplace organization.

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D: Professions and Expertise

Through the Professions and expertise network we seek to develop critical analysis of the dynamics of professions and expertise.

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E: Comparative Capitalisms

The aim of this network is to advance research on changing labor markets, industrial relations, and systems of social protection within the study of contemporary capitalisms.

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F: KITE: Knowledge, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship

This network focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship as well as its underlying technologies and knowledge sources. On these topics, we particularly welcome, but do not require an institutional perspective.

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G: Labor Markets, Education, and Human Resources

The network welcomes contributions on the general issues of labor market segmentation, unemployment, and the link between training, skills and jobs.

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H: Markets, Firms and Institutions

This network focuses on the interrelationships between markets, firms, and institutions.

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I: Alternatives to Capitalism

The broad aim of this research network is to advance the international, comparative and interdisciplinary study of alternatives to capitalism.

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J: Digital Economy

Digital technologies are contributing to radical, growing and unpredictable transformations of economic life, raising a broad range of new issues for scholars of the economy. This research network is dedicated to the study of these issues.

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K: Institutional Experimentation in the Regulation of Work and Employment

This network focuses on making work better through actor experimentation with institutions to regulate work.

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L: Regulation and Governance

This network promotes the interdisciplinary study of regulation and governance at national and global levels.

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M: Spanish Language

A lively Spanish-speaking section that was established in 2011.

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N: Finance and Society

The goal of this network is to promote cross-disciplinary dialogue on the study of finance and include perspectives from social sciences outside of economics.

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O: Global Value Chains

This network aims to bring together social scientists interested in analyzing the causes and consequences of this offshoring-outsourcing phenomenon.

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P: Accounting, Economics, and Law

This network focuses on the intersection of accounting, economics and law. Institutional design, rules and social norms are critical to the working of organizations in economy and society.

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Q: Asian Capitalisms

The basic idea of this first area network within SASE is to make Asia a central field of investigation for theories of institutional change and diversity of capitalism.

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R: Islamic Moral Economy and Finance

This network aims at bringing scholars and practitioners together to consider and discuss the role of Islamic moral economy and Islamic finance in achieving its stated ideals by highlighting the tension areas as well as the dynamism observed in the practice of Islamic finance.

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S: Environment and Climate Change

This Network aspires to advance a broad, interdisciplinary, and critical dialogue on the interactions between the economy, society, and the environment.

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T: Health

This network focuses on the social scientific study of health, broadly defined. It explores four key areas: the embeddedness of health within broader economic, political, and social structures and systems, health equality and equity, organizing and the organization of health, and pricing and valuation of health. The network aims to foster an interdisciplinary community and promote cross-national comparisons in global health, including but not limited to studies about drugs, medicines, healthcare, community and public health, and health policy.

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U: Postcolonialism and Legacies of Empire

This network is devoted to engaging the connections between imperialism, colonialism, racism, slavery, and capitalist expansion and global socio-economic development.

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V: Geoeconomics

This network explores empirical and theoretical puzzles at the intersection of geopolitics, international political economy, and national capitalist systems in an era of ongoing global transformation. It brings together scholars studying how intensifying rivalries, shifting power relations, and geoeconomic competition reshape state strategies, growth models, welfare regimes, and global production networks (and vice versa).

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W: Elites and Power Structures

This network examines how economic, political, and cultural elites shape contemporary socio-economic systems. It brings together scholars exploring elite formation, power, and networks, and their influence on inequality, institutions, markets, and social change through comparative and interdisciplinary research.

 

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View all A-W SASE Networks