Precarious Professionalism: Collective Voice in Healthcare and Higher Education

• In Event: Organizational Politics and the American Political Economy

Abstract

Conflicting demands have left American healthcare and higher education in crisis, putting professional self-governance in both sectors under pressure. Yet the organizations representing physicians and academics have responded very differently. While the American Medical Association (AMA) has come to behave like a self-interested trade association, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) embraced trade unionism to fight capitalist labor exploitation. This paper argues that the two strategies represent different forms of precarious professionalism and explains why the organizations have adopted divergent responses. Specifically, our historical and comparative political economy analysis links the organizations’ strategies to the institutionalized power resources of each profession and to who has controlled each group. More broadly, we present precarious professionalism as a conceptual lens into sectoral transformations that come with important implications for societies’ capacities to realize democratic aspirations within the capitalist realities of the evolving knowledge economy. As such, the paper speaks directly to the conference theme.

Authors

• Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Rutgers University

• Rebecca Givan, Rutgers University