Jurisdictional engagements: Rethinking change in professional authority via pragmatic sociology

Questions of authority, in the broadly Weberian sense of legitimate domination over a specific domain of expert work and voluntary accept of professional commands by lay clients, have long held central interest to the sociology of professions (e.g. Starr, 1982). The same is true for attempts to theorise the ambivalent place of expertise in political processes, including as concerns professional associations (e.g. Eyal, 2019; Schudson, 2006). Yet, as highlighted in a recent contribution to the topic (Harrits & Larsen, 2016), the concept of authority straddles a number of long-standing tensions in the literature on expert professions and professionalism. In particular, while some approaches cast professional groups like medicine, law, engineering, and accountancy as constituted mainly by state (and other) power, social privilege and strategic legal struggles for exclusionary closure and monopoly, others put more emphasis on specialised knowledge and trained judgment as sources of shared meanings and cultural legitimacy for autonomous professional practice. And while attempts exist to reconcile such tensions, it remains the case that analysts find it difficult to specify precisely ‘how authority is constructed, how it changes and how it varies between professions’ (Harrits & Larsen, 2016, p. 155).

In this article, I argue that the French pragmatic sociology of Laurent Thévenot, in particular, has the capacity to analytically clarify professional authority, how it sustains and changes, and thereby move research forward in productive ways. While there is by now a small selection of case studies into professional work drawing on pragmatic sociology (e.g. Annisette & Richardson, 2011; Breviglieri, Pattaroni, & Stavo-Debauge, 2003; Knaapen, Cazeneuve, Cambrosio, Castel, & Fervers, 2010), the full theoretical potentials of this encounter arguably have not yet registered. This may seem surprising, given that key tenets of pragmatic sociology – including its attention to conventions of coordination, standardised forms and equipment, and diverse sources of legitimacy or worth – in fact emerged from the study of change in socio-professional categories and relations of organised work (Boltanski, 1982[1987]; Thévenot, 1984; see also Amossé, 2013; Thévenot, 2016).¹ Drawing on the landmark model of justification (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991[2006]) and Thévenot’s subsequent sociology of engagements (2007), my aim here is to reclaim this theoretical backdrop and to suggest ways of putting it to work in analysing cultural-political shifts in professional authority.

My motivation for this conceptual endeavour stems in part from the current state of conversation around professional change, in general, and widespread suggestions more specifically that professional autonomy and authority is increasingly under siege from neoliberal market rule, decline in public trust, growing state imposition of new public management regimes, or some combination hereof. Such suggestions, for sure, are by no means new, as witnessed by ideas of ‘de-professionalization’ emerging already in the 1970s (e.g. Haug, 1975). Still, as a recent editorial on ‘professions under suspicion’ puts it (Carvalho, Correia, & Serra, 2018, p. 10), ‘references to the decline of the professions continues to lack a proper framework’. Arguably, such a lack mirrors a broader conceptual confusion as concerns the sources and conditions of professional authority. This situation, I suggest, is endemic not only to the sociology of professions but more generally to theorizations of professional expertise in ‘political (late-)modernity’; a term that I use tentatively here to designate the Euro-American situation post the broad-based ‘debunking of professional authority’ in public discourses of the 1960s (Schudson, 2006, p. 492) and the correlative sense in which expertise has become inherently ambivalent for democracies (see Eyal, 2019 for an extended discussion). In this sense, my claim is that Thévenot’s pragmatic sociology contains within it the seeds of an original re-theorization of professional authority, eventually promising to re-stage wider research debates on a topic of great social-scientific interest.

To help articulate this re-staging and place it within its relevant research setting, I organise my search for a pragmatic sociology of professional authority by adopting Andrew Abbott’s (1988) seminal and field-defining notion of professional jurisdiction as my starting point. Jurisdiction, according to Abbott, is what professional groups achieve when successfully claiming and sustaining authority over a particular domain of expert work, in competition with other professional groups and typically in alliance with powerful groups in adjacent university and political ecologies (see Abbott, 2005). While mine is neither meant as a full theoretical comparison nor as an attempted synthesis, adopting Abbott’s jurisdictional model as backdrop helps articulate the stakes and promises of the pragmatic-sociological alternative. In general terms, Abbott’s work shares with pragmatic sociology the interest in how dynamics of power and legitimacy jointly shape inter-professional struggle, coordination, and problem-solving. This is true, even as Abbott pays less attention than the latter to how diverse moral conventions shape such engagements – the central topic, as I will unfold, to pragmatic sociology.

Meanwhile, Abbott’s (1988) attention to how the workplace, the public sphere, and the legal-political apparatus of the state constitute three ‘arenas’ (or indeed ‘ecologies’) for professional claims-making provides a suitable starting point for sketching core institutional arrangements of professional authority and how they change in a meso-historical perspective.² As is well known from reflections on pragmatic sociology in general (e.g. Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005), change in institutional arrangements over decades are sometimes downplayed in this framework, although arguably less so in Thévenot’s engagement sociology (e.g. Thévenot, 2012). Indeed, I will be arguing that, as part of its contribution, Thévenot’s distinction of engagement regimes allows one to enrich Abbott’s depiction of the key professional arenas, in grasping the role of public justification work and embodied workplace practices, alongside organised profession-state relations, as all central to a situated view of change in professional authority.

While thus primarily a question of conceptual reconstruction and development, my discussions in this article also draw from and ultimately feed back into on-going collaborative empirical studies of professional change in current-day Denmark. More specifically, I illustrate the potentials of pragmatic sociology to rethink professional authority by way of three collectively undertaken case studies into inter-professional, organisational, and political coordination around challenges of urban climate adaptation, lifestyle disease prevention and innovation management, respectively, over the past two-three decades. We report elsewhere on the methodological details, the (inter-)professional specificity, and the comparative variability involved in and across these quite divergent domains of expert-professional work, dominated as they are by different professional groups and projects (e.g. Blok et al., 2019). For present purposes, the three cases serve merely an illustrative purpose, together indicating the general scope of applicability of pragmatic-sociological concepts and the potential to further elaborate this approach in the direction of a fully comparative framework for analysing professional moral engagements in workplace-based and public-political affairs (see Champy & Israël, 2009).

The article unfolds as follows. In the next section, I sketch how the pragmatic sociology of justification helps re-theorise professional authority, in dialogue with Abbott and others. I then turn, in subsequent sections, to discuss in more detail how dynamics of professional authority emerge as objects of wider pragmatic-sociological inquiry in relation to public engagements, to legal-political regulatory forms, and to workplace judgments, respectively, drawing on Thévenot’s regimes of engagement and illustrating each with empirical examples. In conclusion, I discuss briefly how pragmatic sociology allows comparative attention to the variability of ‘compositions’ (Thévenot, 2014b) of professional authority, as shaped by (trans-)national as well as cross-jurisdictional differences, while outlining points for further cross-fertilisation between pragmatic sociology and wider problems of expertise in political (late-)modernity.

In a recent study of professions’ ‘legitimacy work’, informed by neo-institutionalist assumptions, Suddaby, Bévort, and Pedersen (2019) touch briefly on the intersection to pragmatic sociology’s trademark interest in ‘orders of worth’, understood as grammars of legitimate justification and critique (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991[2006]). While these neo-institutionalist scholars share with pragmatic sociology an interest in situated practices of judgment and justification, they nevertheless conclude (Suddaby et al., 2019, p. 108) that ‘[a] significant oversight of the orders of worth approach […] is that it overlooks the powerful role of professionals in the process of making judgments of taste’. Their example pertains to an emerging profession of cultural critics authorised to make decisions on government film grants from the Danish state. Yet their claim extends to the work of engineers or architects, for instance, who make authorised judgments based on a combination of what, following Halliday (1985), Suddaby et al. call ‘scientific’ and ‘normative’ knowledge claims, respectively. Pragmatic sociology, as I will show, in fact questions this latter, sharp distinction. However, if pragmatic sociology wholly ‘overlooks’ situations of professional judgments, then my endeavour in this text will look bleak to begin with.

Fortunately, closer attention to the pragmatic-sociological source in question reveals this conclusion as questionable at best. While it is correct to say that the model set forth in On Justification pertains chiefly to ordinary as opposed to expert-based judgments, as put to use in everyday disputes, questions of professional judgment are far from absent in this book. They show up, first, in what Boltanski and Thévenot (2006[1991], p. 203ff) dub the grammar of industrial worth, understood as an evaluative framework which rely on science-backed expert knowledge to ascertain the common good of functional efficiency in productive, technical, and other situations. Indeed, the book argues, the notion of professional qualifications pertains chiefly to this grammar, thereby suggesting, contra the neo-institutionalists (Halliday, 1985), a close proximity of technical adjustments and moral judgments in all professional work. In other words, pragmatic sociology starts by assigning a specific, industrial role to professional expertise within its wider view of legitimate ordering principles in political modernity. This wider view, in turn, is marked by the way actors coordinate, justify, and critique situational arrangements in reference to a limited plurality of generally justifiable principles, or orders of worth, such as market competition, civic solidarity, domestic dependency or ecological integrity (see Table 1).

Second, and just as importantly, questions of professional authority show up in On Justification’s extensive meso-historical sketch of the societal value compromises associated with the development of welfare state policies over the twentieth century (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006[1991], p. 285ff). In reference to Durkheim’s work on professional corporations and ethics, Boltanski and Thévenot basically argue here that the conditions of possibility for professional authority in industrial societies like the French arise at the more-or-less institutionalised intersection of domestic, industrial, and civic forms of worth. In other words, to (re-)gain their privileges inside political modernity (see Portwood & Fielding, 1981), former guild-based trade associations (domestic) must now re-associate, more firmly, to a state-guaranteed sense of expert credentials (industrial) put to society-wide (civic), as opposed to merely market or industrial, utility. Such arrangements, they argue, gradually come to form a set of ‘instrumented compromises’, not only via education policies and state licensure, but through a whole range of legal labour arrangements, statistical equipment, and conventions of collective representation.³ Nevertheless, ‘a person’s profession […] remains a passageway between worths and an object of tension’ (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006[1991], p. 292). Such tensions manifest, for instance, in inspired critiques of expert technocracy and in civic critiques of the familial transmission of professional status – critiques present not least during the upheavals of the 1960s (Champy & Israël, 2009).

It is important to note how this brief sketch serves to place Boltanski and Thévenot’s argument at the centre of long-standing yet unresolved debates in the sociology of professions on the internally related questions of expert legitimacy and authority. One key point of interlocution is with the classical study of Paul Starr (1982) on the social transformation of American medicine, in which he extends Weber’s concept of legitimate authority into a two-fold distinction of ‘cultural’ from ‘social’ authority. Later on, Abbott (1988, p. 60) inherits this distinction as central to his analysis of professional jurisdiction. According to Starr (1982, p. 13), social authority ‘involves the control of action through the giving of commands’, in ways resonant with Weber’s rational-legal authority, in that such professional capacities rest ultimately with legal powers delegated from the state. By contrast, Starr agues (Starr, 1982, p. 13), cultural authority ‘entails the construction of reality through definitions of fact and value’. As grounded via scientific claims, Starr’s cultural authority is thus a measure of the extent to which lay publics defer to the professional’s superior expert competency when making judgments, such as over health symptoms and treatments. Via developments in medical science around the turn of the twentieth century, Starr shows, medicine’s cultural authority grew as it increasingly shaped patients’ own experiences and attained recognition of the ‘legitimate complexity’ of its tasks (Starr, 1982, pp. 140ff).

While Starr’s historical-sociological work has much to recommend it, from the perspective of pragmatic sociology, his (and Abbott’s) conceptual distinction between social and cultural authority seems too coarse and insufficiently grounded in a wider view of society’s moral conventions. This is true, even as it resonates, in a first approximation, with pragmatic sociology’s distinction between civic-based (‘social’) and industrial-based (‘cultural’) authority, respectively. However, as noted, pragmatic sociology instead casts professional authority as involving a set of instrumented compromises, in the sense of fragile claims to composite forms of worth, variably held together as sources of legitimacy across different arenas of professional engagement. Here, the very notion of the compromise, as outlined by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991[2006]), thus serves to subtly-but-importantly shift the terms in which professional authority should be theorised and analysed. It does so by stressing its inherent sources of uncertainty and tension and thereby making the question of its stabilisation across situations via forms of instrumentation all the more crucial. Moreover, the ambiguous organisational settings in which expertise works, Boltanski and Thévenot shows, requires one to add localised skills and traditions (domestic), beyond the purely technical sense of science-backed (industrial) expertise, to understand how professional authority is variously sustained or challenged across such settings.

In sum, unlikely existing approaches, pragmatic sociology allows us to theorise the inherent ambiguities of professional authority in situated socio-political ordering practices and arrangements, as resting simultaneously on several distinct sources of legitimacy (industrial, civic, domestic). At the same time, it allows us to realise how traces of such ambiguities around professional authority have long shaped key and recurrent conceptual debates and dualities in the sociology of expert professions, across different organisational levels of analysis. In turn, pragmatic sociology’s contribution can be spelled out in relation to three such dualities: the tension between technical and indeterminate forms of knowledge; between professions’ self-interest and their service to public interest; and between professionalism’s institutional arrangements in ‘market-dominant’ (Anglo-American) and in ‘state-dominant’ (continental European) settings. While all three themes are subject to vast literatures, and indeed are variously at work in any particular instance of professional practice and authority (e.g. Pace, 2003), I focus here only on select pronouncements to highlight the analytical capacities of pragmatic sociology.

The distinction between technical and indeterminate knowledge forms was first suggested by Jamous and Peliolle’s (1970) analysis of tensions in medical authority, and it resonates with a point made in pragmatic sociology. Medical authority, Jamous and Peloille showed, rests only partly on ‘technicality’, understood as codified knowledge supported by science-backed rules. Some of its components rather escape such rule-based codification and remain more esoteric, as ascribed to the specific virtues or rooted experiences of the professional. These latter aspects of ‘indetermination’, in turn, pose ambiguous challenges for professionals’ attempt to avoid the routinisation of their practice. Hence, while technical, abstract (Abbott, 1988), or formal (Freidson, 1986) knowledge is inherently elitist, it may nonetheless be justified by reference to rules that are in principle accessible to lay and political evaluation (according to industrial worth). By contrast, while the uncertain judgments associated with indeterminate knowledge may be important to proper professional practice, they are harder to justify in public (see Champy, 2018).

Pragmatic sociology, as noted, put these tensions of professional judgment centre stage. Hence, in an early study of the construction of socio-professional categories in French labour statistics (1983; reprinted as Thévenot, 2016), Thévenot observes that professions such as medicine pertain to an intermediary place in-between the state, the art and the trade, as three ways of making one’s occupation worthy of status. Here, state refers to academic qualifications backed up by law, that is, to professional credentialism (Freidson, 1986); art refers to allusions of personal talent of import to professional practice (akin to Jamous and Peloille’s indeterminate knowledge); and trade refers to experience and know-how attained during apprenticeship. In the language of On Justification, these notions translate, in turn, to ‘the supposition that industrial and domestic forms [of worth] can be made compatible’ and be mediated by ‘domestic experts’ (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991[2006], p. 315). Carlos Ramirez (2013) study of how members of the British audit profession reacted differently and critically to new state-imposed audit regulations, depending on their established more-or-less industrial (Big Five, formalised, contract-based) or domestic (small firms, informal, trust-based) organising of client relations provide an interesting illustration of this very point. Moreover, such domestic, workplace-based aspects of professionalism here border to what Thévenot (2007) later dubs a grammar of familiar engagement, as I will unfold later in connection to professionals’ embodied workplace judgments.

This brings me to the second key conceptual duality, that between casting professions as altruistic agents of the public interest or as self-interested cartels in pursuit of autonomy, status, and power. While simplistic, this stark contrast nonetheless continuously reemerges at the conceptual level of debate in the sociology of professions, as traceable back to Durkheim and Weber, respectively. Here, unlike for instance Bourdieu-inspired approaches to professions as part of an elite field of power (e.g. Dezalay, 1995), which ultimately denies any sense of legitimate professional authority, pragmatic sociology starts from the observation that professional claims to jurisdiction are subject to and shaped by public-political constraints of justification. Such constraints, as Thévenot observes (2016, p. 111), means that professional claims ordinarily exert themselves not ‘through influence or manipulation’, but by ‘resorting to the most objectivised resources in the definition of professions’. These resources may include statistical categories, academic titles, regulatory texts, representative bodies, and ethical codes – established instruments (or ‘invested forms’; Thévenot, 1984) constituted in relation to and lending degrees of stability to the state-backed industrial-civic compromise of professional authority.

This does not imply that professional self-interest plays no role in attendant state-professional relations, let alone in inter-professional struggles over work jurisdiction (Abbott, 1988). Rather, it means that questions of ‘self-interest’ form part of those processes of justification and critical denunciation that shape professional authority (see Moody & Thévenot, 2000). Theoretically speaking, in short, justifications of public service and critiques of professions’ undue self-interest are equally plausible yet contingent situational achievements. Moreover, as I unfold later, Thévenot’s (2009, 2012) notion of plan-based engagement lends itself to further specifying this point. It does so by allowing us to theorise how the instrumented compromises of professional authority increasingly form part of arrangements that he dubs ‘governance through objectives’, in ways that create state-backed room for yet may also and ambivalently strain the possibilities of professions such as medicine to justify their authority.

Third and finally, this relates in turn to the oft-noted duality of professional regulation in Anglo-American as opposed to continental European settings, including the Scandinavian welfare states like Denmark that form the empirical anchoring point for this article. Andrew Abbott (1988, p. 60), for instance, relates this difference to the stronger ability of continental governments to impose social obligations on the professions, in exchange for their cultural (that is, expert-based) authority. This depends, in turn, on the role of continental states like the French not only in regulating professions, but also in continuously creating new positions of professional work in the state bureaucracy (Abbott, 1988, p. 161). While this kind of Anglo-American versus continental duality can be easily overstated (Freidson, 1986, p. 119ff), it does imply a need to pose state-professional relations as subject to wide comparative variability. This point is well illustrated by Thomas Le Bianic (2003) in the case of French psychologists, who tend to differentiate into two large ‘segments’ (Bucher & Strauss, 1961), whose claim to authority is based respectively on their ‘cognitive’ superiority or their ‘status’ in relation to state-guaranteed work positions.

Reinterpreted in the framework of pragmatic sociology, Le Bianic’s contrast again mirrors the distinction between civic and industrial worth, as jointly but differently pursued by various professional groups. As such, his study arguably points to the characteristically prominent place of civic (and state-based) justifications in the self-constitution of many French and, by extension, continental European professions and professional segments. Writing on Scandinavia more specifically, Margareta Bertilsson (1990) similarly argued that the growth of postwar professions like law, social work, and pedagogy is here intimately tied to their roles as mediators of basic citizen rights vis-à-vis the growing welfare state. Recent studies into the authority claims of doctors and teachers in Denmark from 1950 to 2010 point in the same direction (Harrits & Larsen, 2016). Here, over time, the official associations of these largely state-employed professional groups have increasingly come to position themselves as active guardians of public hospitals and schools, to the point of criticising government attempts to de-regulate or marketize these civic institutions by exercising a distinct moral-political engagement.

To summarise, far from overlooking questions of professional judgment, as some suggest (Suddaby et al., 2019), pragmatic sociology in fact provides a range of conceptual tools with which to re-theorise and study professional authority in practice- and situation-sensitive ways, across the various arenas of professional jurisdiction (Abbott, 1988). Here, in particular, the core concept of orders of worth and the meso-historical sketch of civic-industrial compromises around professional status claims and regulations provide tools with which to analyse professions’ public-political work of justification and critique, as well as their inscription into powerful and legally authorised state forms. Moreover, these points can be fruitfully complemented, as I have hinted, by attending more closely to the theoretical extension of the justification model set forth in Thévenot’s (2007, 2012) subsequent elaboration of mainly two further and distinct engagement regimes, the plan-based and the familiar. In what follows, I expand upon this argument by unfolding Thévenot’s regimes of engagement, in turn tying the plan-based to state-profession relations and the familiar to workplace judgments, and illustrating their importance for professional authority by drawing selectively on our own empirical case studies.

My notion of jurisdictional engagements point ultimately, as noted, to the full range of workplace, public, and legal-political practices of coordination involved when various professional groups seek to acquire, sustain, or change their professional authority vis-à-vis other professional groups, university-based research, or political allies over a particular domain of expert tasks (Abbott, 2005). To further theorise this more ‘composite’ (Thévenot, 2014b) sense of professional authority, I draw on Thévenot’s (2007, 2012) key distinction between justifiable, plan-based, and familiar engagement regimes. Here, justifiable engagement corresponds to the model of justificatory practices in reference to moral-political categories of the common good (orders of worth) unfolded in On Justification. By contrast, plan-based engagements refer to strategic practices inside some individual or collective striving, oriented to the good of achieving one’s ends, and subject to negotiations amongst agents recognised as holding legitimate stakes in the plan (the ‘stakeholders’, for instance, of a governance arrangement). Familiar engagements, in turn, refer to personalised and embodied practices of making oneself at ease in a close, socio-material environment (the home, the workplace), while coordinating with others through mutual adjustments and non-codified judgments (as opposed to shared plans or moral agreement). In what follows, the key argument is that professional authority sustains and changes at the coordinated and instrumented intersection of these three main types of jurisdictional engagement.⁴

This fuller picture of professional authority in action becomes particularly pertinent, as we have argued elsewhere (Blok et al., 2019), when approached from the perspective of emerging professional projects that entail new routines of inter-professional coordination and play themselves out over meso-historical processes of change in professional work, organisation, and regulation. Such processes entail intensified professional claims-making (Abbott, 1988), whereby different professional groups actively cooperate and compete to bring new tasks, tied to novel societal challenges, within the variously expanding or contracting sphere of their professional authority. This is what our collaborative empirical study sets out to explore. Specifically, we compare professional engagements across three contested domains, all tied to global challenges impinging on Danish local-national professional governance reforms (see Blok et al., 2018). Put briefly, these pertain to the engagements of engineers, landscape architects, and planners in the domain of urban water-based climate adaption; of doctors, nurses, and auxiliary health groups in the domain of lifestyle disease prevention; and of management engineers, business economists, anthropologists and others in the domain of innovation management.

In methodological terms, each case study deploys a combination of methods in order to encompass the three arenas stressed by Abbott (1988): practice-near interviews and observations at the workplace level; analysis of official policy documents for legal and other state-professional relations; and analysis of relevant association journals to gauge the various professions’ public grammars of justification (see Blok et al., 2019). Relative to comparable approaches, and in line with general pragmatic-sociological principles (Thévenot, 2012), this expresses our attempt to not only study discursive claims to authority of various professional groups, but rather also the institutional arrangements or dispositifs (Knaapen et al., 2010), as well as the materialised equipment and forms, by which professionals become socio-politically authorised to engage emerging tasks. In what follows, as noted, my ambition is neither to unfold these processes in any empirical detail, nor to conduct comparative analysis, but rather to draw on key insights from the cases to illustrate the fruitfulness of Thévenot’s engagement regimes for grasping central aspects of how professional authority is being reconstituted. Along the lines of what Flyvbjerg (2006, p. 230) calls ‘maximum variation’ cases, the fact that I draw my pool of illustrations from such diverse domains of professional expert work serves, I believe, to corroborate my argument for the general relevance of a pragmatic-sociological approach.

Relative to and consistent with the theoretical sketch from On Justification, what our analyses allows, overall, when it comes to the justifiable engagements of professional groups, is to note how this entails in fact a twin work of claiming authority in public vis-à-vis the emerging tasks at stake. Hence, on the one hand, professional associations publicly lend their credibility to the wider socio-political construction of these issues as calling for regulatory intervention in the name of the public good (civic worth). On the other hand, they do so by simultaneously seeking to position their own expertise as uniquely qualified to the proper handling of the tasks (industrial worth), in processes of inter-professional competition (Abbott, 1988). Often, while potentially open for critical public scrutiny, professional and regulatory agencies seem to tacitly coordinate and exchange their authority within the conventional bounds set by this instrumented, taken-for-granted ordering arrangement. Indeed, this very observation might be seen to corroborate the claim recently made by Larson (2018, p. 35), to the effect that, growing suspicions notwithstanding, professionalism writ large – in the sense of delegation of public tasks to expert professionals – has proven a ‘lasting strategy’ for societal problem-solving.

Importantly, however, professional groups across our cases are also engaged in more explicit work of public-political justification, both in relation to the moral-political specificities of the tasks and in relation to the situational realities of inter-professional ‘boundary work’ in these ecologies (see Blok et al., 2019). As concerns the former, professional groups variously attempt to associate their own skills and efforts to the broader pattern of public-political values and compromises for the common good at stake in the domain. Meanwhile, as concerns the latter, such active assertions of legitimate authority tend to happen with a view to established inter-professional relations and ‘settlements’ (Abbott, 1988), which shape the way professional segments differentially pursue the new tasks as opportunities to improve their jurisdictional authority positions.⁵ Overall, however, this process is far from a straightforward case of professions linking their knowledge mandate to some ‘transcendent value’ (Freidson, 1999), as Abbott (1988) amongst others suggest. Instead, a pragmatic sociology of jurisdictional engagements uncovers a more situation-bound process of professions’ moral-political manoeuvring.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of how these processes play out pertains to the way a segment of landscape architects attempts to carve out a share of the emerging water-based climate adaptation domain vis-à-vis the engineers, the traditional incumbents of closely adjacent jurisdictions. They do so, to an important extent, by allying themselves via justification work to an extensive public-political consensus around ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ urban development in Denmark (see Meilvang, 2019). Here, landscape architects are central in promoting new techniques for handling excess rainwater on the urban surface, known as LAR, techniques in turn justified towards municipal leaders and lay publics as much by their environmental (green) and recreational (civic) ‘surplus values’ as by their technical efficiency (industrial). By contrast, engineers active in the urban drainage jurisdiction and its long-established institutional arrangements, including the state-backed Wastewater Committee, tend to stick more narrowly to industrial efficiency criteria, even as they cooperate on LAR installations in practice. Towards municipal sponsors, this makes landscape architects more visible, and often more publicly legitimate, as consultants to hire for ‘high-end’, prestigious sustainability-oriented projects.

 Similar kinds of public justification work, albeit routed to rather different effects, is at work amongst professional groups in the other two emerging jurisdictions as well. As concerns the prevention of (so-called) lifestyle-related diseases, such as diabetes 2, segments of nurses have come to adopt this as a new ‘mission’ (Bucher & Strauss, 1961), resonant with their core calling as care professionals and backed up in spirit by their professional association. In doing so, nurses have attempted via public justification work to ally with a sense of civic (in-)justice, stemming from the steep socio-economic inequalities in exposure to the risks of lifestyle diseases. Relatedly, in the domain of innovation management, professional justifications of new public-private-university partnerships revolve to a large extent around what Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) locates in the pragmatic-sociological vein as a new ‘projective’ spirit of capitalism. To justify their claims to authority in this domain, then, professional segments hailing from parts of engineering, business economics, as well as psychology and anthropology have consequently sought to re-articulate their skill-sets in reference to a project-based order of worth, invoking a ‘hybrid’ capacity to foster and lead collective creativity via shifting networks.

In sum, public-political justification work is key, our studies confirm, to the way professional groups claim and, sometimes, attain new degrees of authority over emerging expert tasks and jurisdictions. Across all three domains, meso-historical patterns emerge in the shape of newly instrumented compromises shared by key professional and public regulatory agencies, serving to mark out the boundaries within which professional groups may legitimately claim authority vis-à-vis clients and lay publics. Such emerging compromises are shaped, in turn, not only by the various justificatory campaigns of professional segments, but also by wider historical patterns of inter-professional settlement at workplace levels and extant organisational arrangements in state-profession relations (see Thévenot, 2001). To attain a fuller view of these scope conditions, however, we must look beyond the public arena and its justificatory dynamics and attend more fully to broader compositions of professional authority via plan-based state-professional arrangements and workplace dynamics of embodied judgment, respectively.

In general terms, one key yet under-appreciated affordance of pragmatic sociology is that justification work is seen as conditioned by a wider set of organisational arrangements (Thévenot, 2001). Overall, pragmatic sociology conceptualises such arrangements as symbolic and material dispositifs, a term adopted from Foucault to speak about historical socio-material formats for linking power and knowledge in specific ways, such as in the legal casework of courts (Thévenot, 2012) or the setting of guidelines in a medical committee (Knaapen et al., 2010). Relatedly, Thévenot (1984) has long stressed how more-or-less standardised ‘forms’ shape powers of formal coordination within companies and administrations, in everything from scientific protocols to legal codes, collective agreements, professional classifications, and similar ‘state forms’ invested with generalised validity. As noted, various legitimated (mostly civic-industrial) forms shape state-profession relations in important ways, and the jurisdictional engagements of professional groups pertain in part to negotiations over their gradual reshaping.

 Moreover, to hark back to the discussion sketched in the introduction, Thévenot’s plan-based engagement regime lends itself to a particular rethinking of what, in the sociology of professions, is usually cast as ‘neoliberal’ reforms to professional governance (e.g. Carvalho et al., 2018). As hinted, Thévenot (2009, 2012) alternatively theorises this as ‘governance through objectives’, stressing that a relative turn to market-like evaluation in public affairs has gone hand in hand with an equally important shift towards state-backed audits and measures (‘objectives’), whereby policies are increasingly established via stakeholder negotiations around the ‘objectification’ of policy goals. Such developments carry vast implications for professions, as witnessed not least in state-authorised guidelines for ‘evidence-basing’ the health sector (Castel, 2009). As shown by pragmatic sociology-informed studies (e.g. Knaapen et al., 2010), the regulatory committees through which such guidelines emerge involve professional associations into power-laden negotiations that may either threaten their authority via new forms of oversight or provide new venues for the strategic reassertion of jurisdiction (see Thévenot, 2009).

A full empirical analysis of such shifts in formal professional arrangements is a demanding task, as it requires attending to a plurality of ‘form-shaping’ activities across several organisational settings and ecologies, something stressed also by Thévenot (2009) in his reflections on standard-setting and -implementation in medicine. What pragmatic sociology highlights, however, somewhat in contrast to most existing debates (e.g. Carvalho et al., 2018), is the engaged role sought out by professional groups as co-shapers of such evolving governance forms in their jurisdictional domains. Such involvement does not imply control or complicity; rather, one should speak of a continuum of influence over form-shaping activities in jurisdictions, from highly profession-controlled to highly state- or company-controlled forms. This pragmatic-sociological conception entails, then, that various professional groups tend to enjoy recognition as holding legitimate stakes in broader governance reforms, authorising them to make interventions also beyond their narrowly technical expertise (see Harrits & Larsen, 2016). In the language of Thévenot (2014b), professions thus act as key stakeholders in wider plan-based engagements with setting those ‘objectified objectives’ to which governance increasingly turns.

In our own studies, the domain of innovation management is one in which questions of standardisation, in the sense of attempts to construct uniformities across space and time through the generation of agree-upon rules and forms (Timmermans & Epstein, 2010, p. 71), is an integral part of professional engagements. In particular, a segment of university-based management engineers has constituted themselves as guarantors of innovation skills for the wider Danish community of company and state stakeholders by pursuing a strategy of transnational standard-setting in the International Organization of Standardization, ISO (Blok et al., 2018). In turn, professionals reimport such standards as part of constructing a new educational landscape, where technical universities in particular now offer up new MMT (Master-in-Management-of-Technology) programmes to certify innovation expertise, in ways supported organisationally by new (projective) state-company partnerships. On the part of the engineering association, such tactical moves are meant explicitly as part of a longer-term strategy to increase the share of engineers in top management positions across Danish knowledge-based companies. The extent to which this strategy materialises is so far uncertain, however. Here, it matters that Danish company management is still marked by tensions located by Thévenot (1984, p. 22) in the 1980s, between professionalised (industrial) and more informal, seniority-based (domestic) promotion routes.

Relatedly, in the domain of water-based climate adaptation, state- and municipality-orchestrated attempt to integrate the many types of expertise and concern in play pertains to the formation of new calculation and decision-support tools for urban planners. Various professional segments, in the shape of landscape-architectural and engineering consultants, engage actively in such form-shaping endeavours, by adjudicating the tools’ functioning in reference to whether or not they accommodate their preferred adaptation options – thus anticipating how such standardised forms may come to shape their own practice and scope of judgment. In this sense, new planning tools become sites of re-negotiating state-professional and inter-professional relations and alliances at the same time, with much scope for professional influence. By contrast, in the domain of lifestyle disease prevention, new guidelines and formats of screening and intervention initiatives implemented in hospital and other public health service settings over the last decades are imposed rather unilaterally by the state and its health regulatory apparatus. Over the years, the nursing association along with auxiliary health occupations have campaigned for change to associated legal codes, arguing that an expanded nursing mandate vis-à-vis medical doctors would facilitate more encompassing prevention work to the benefit of citizens. However, such attempts to alter formalised inter-professional hierarchies has so far failed.

In sum, I argue that these plan-based aspects of professionals’ jurisdictional engagements show the value of pragmatic sociology’s attention to more-or-less standardised forms and codes as key sites of mediating change in professional authority vis-à-vis shifting governance arrangements, in and beyond the state. While attention to state-professional negotiations is widespread in the sociology of professions (e.g. Abbott, 1988, 2005), re-casting these as a matter of professional groups’ attempt to co-shape investments in new governance forms proves fruitful to an analysis of meso-historical change. This is particularly true when seen, along with Thévenot’s (2009, 2014b) stress on composite organisational arrangements, in tandem with shifts in the justification work and attendant instrumented compromises shaping professionals’ public legitimacy. Together, I argue, this engagement-sociological approach help recast debates on professional authority in more multi-directional terms, pointing to a continuum of influence across diverse organisational arenas. I now turn to add the workplace arena of jurisdictional engagements to this picture, before unfolding the general points further in the concluding section.

Whereas change in professional authority happens crucially via justification work in public and the co-shaping of new state-professional forms, attendant adjustments happen as much at the workplace level, where professionals must exercise and adapt their practices and conventions of everyday, largely non-codified judgment. Here, processes of change are likely to prove challenging, according to pragmatic sociology, in part due to the way professional practices involve a gradual familiarisation with highly localised and personalised work requirements (Thévenot, 2007). Familiarisation, however, does not mean routine in the sense of habitual stability; rather, it involves dealing with shifting work environments that threaten to escape the grasp of the professional, requiring thereby gradual re-adjustments in habituation, workflows, and forms of (often tacit) mutual coordination. Such requirements are enhanced by the fact that professional work is marked, to a characteristic degree, exactly by its non-routinized character, in the sense of regularly deploying skills in an active process of ‘inference’ (Abbott, 1988) tailored to the concrete aspects of specific clients. Such ‘prudential activities’, as Florent Champy (2018) aptly terms them, arguably take on specific importance when professionals face a set of relatively novel tasks, procedures, and requirements. In such situations, I argue, workplace authority is crucially a matter of re-calibrating non-codified judgments to meet new tests of appropriateness, including by way of shaping embodied experiences into opportunities for learning.⁶

Embodied learning, as I conceive it here, pertains mainly to what Thévenot (e.g. 2007) calls the ‘open’, uneasy, or doubtful side of familiar professional engagements, spurred by constraints experienced by professionals to readjust their everyday practices in response to new workplace requirements. Such requirements, in turn, are most often the result of new justificatory compromises and state-professional forms, as previously sketched, being filtered into management scripts and re-organised workflows, sometimes with attendant justificatory tensions between professional groups present also in the everyday work setting and its equipment (Meilvang, 2019). Rather than such disputes being openly staged at workplace levels, however, the more typical trajectory that we observed was for members of professional segments in relatively subordinate positions to take on a larger share of the burdens of adjustment and learning involved in new workplace requirements. Sometimes, this would pose also an additional and more affirmative set of opportunities, tied to the kind of excitement for novelty and surprise that Thévenot (e.g. 2014a) associate with the regime of engagement in exploration. For these lesser-authorised professional segments, however, explorative engagements remained occasional at best, subordinated to more pressing exigencies of embodied, everyday readjustments.

Such dynamics of professionals’ familiar engagements and the challenges they pose for upholding or refashioning authority under conditions of jurisdictional change become particularly visible in the work of nurses and other auxiliary health professionals in dealing with patients ‘in need’ of changing their dietary or other habits to prevent lifestyle disease onset. This is a task which, while partly claimed actively by nurses through justification work, as noted, is also partly left to nurses by hierarchically superordinate medical doctors who tend to shy away on account of a presumed lack of evidence and codified procedures. In many ways, this situation entails challenges akin to those diagnosed by Thévenot and fellow pragmatic sociologists in the French context of social work, where social workers are increasingly tasked with motivating unemployed clients to find new employment by entering into close proximity to clients’ every-day and intimate troubles (Breviglieri et al., 2003). Similarly, nurses doing disease prevention work face tensions shaped by the particular vulnerabilities of their clients, whereby they need to engage in proximate relations with patients’ personal dietary, alcohol, exercise, and smoking habits while still respecting their autonomy and building relations of trust in their advice. Meanwhile, nurses must manoeuvre to defend their relative authority vis-à-vis medical doctors.

In response, many nurses seek to attain new and additional skills in interpersonal communication and psychological techniques for fostering motivation in others, while trying to incorporate such skills flexibly into everyday work practices tied to professional judgments of proper care vis-à-vis patients suffering multiple ailments. Making such judgments in situationally appropriate ways, however, entails then a delicate balancing act: whereas sometimes-incongruent guidelines and inter-professional hierarchies put pressure on them to adopt new prevention screening procedures, nurses sometimes deflect from these out of concern with not bringing up socially stigmatised matters in the daily contacts with patients whose authorised trust they need to maintain for compliance (Blok et al., 2018). In this respect, nurses often find themselves caught in-between new state-backed rules and procedures, on the one hand, and the dictates of their situational work judgment, on the other. Such non-codified judgments, in turn, are shaped by cumulated experiences of familiar engagement with patients, as well as by the active but constrained search for ways of turning such experiences into learning opportunities.

In related ways, the case of water-based climate adaptation poses many open-ended uncertainties for all professionals involved, in that how drainage on the surface is shaped by contingencies of soil composition, landscape inclinations, choice of material, and other concrete aspects of any urban intervention remains largely unknown. Under these conditions, to the degree allowed by organisational constraints, landscape architects and environmental engineers prove keen to engage in a variety of prudential activities, oriented to gaining first-hand experience with the real-world workings of new techniques (Meilvang, 2020). Relative to the doctor-nurse relation, moreover, the more equal authority relations played out between these two segments allow greater scope for the justification work of landscape architects to translate into workplace practices more favourable to their aesthetic and other non-codified judgments. Finally, in the domain of innovation management, the competent innovation manager is seen to possess the ability to orchestrate a set of seemingly contradictory impulses shaped by familiar workplace dynamics, including by finding ways of fostering an excitement for novelty amongst occupational groups of unequal status in the company. In this process, innovation managers must continuously re-assert their own authority, in part by demonstrating relevant technical skills, while at the same time learning new skills of exciting, project-based organising (see Blok et al., 2018).

In sum, I argue that Thévenot’s notion of ‘open’ or uneasy familiar engagement – at its intersection, sometimes, with constrained engagements in exploration for novelty – is well suited to understanding processes of adjustment and everyday embodied learning to which professional actors resort during moments of uncertainty, as an important aspect of how their authority works and may be reconstituted at the workplace level. This is particularly true, I suggest, when analysing situations – such as the jurisdictional engagements we study – where the relative absence of established conventions of coordination and judgment require for professionals to re-adjust their prudential activities (Champy, 2018). Across diverse professions and jurisdictional domains, workplace questions of experience-based judgment and its change through learning of new tests of appropriateness are key, I argue, to the practical working out of new inter-professional and instrumented state-profession compromises and for translating these into actionable professional authority inside organisations. Here, pragmatic sociology ultimately allows one to grasp what Abbott (1988) calls the relative disconnect between the different arenas of professional authority as a matter of tensions and compositions among different regimes of engagement, from the familiar workplace to the public-political setting of the state and beyond.

In this article, I argue that the French pragmatic sociology of Laurent Thévenot, in particular, constitutes an as-yet largely untapped resource for re-theorising key questions in the sociology of professions, in particular as these pertain to the sources of legitimacy underlying and the organisational arrangements supporting professional authority. Invoking Andrew Abbott’s (1988, 2005) field-defining work on the arenas and ecologies of professional claims to jurisdiction, and discussing with kindred recent work (e.g. Harrits & Larsen, 2016; Suddaby et al., 2019), I show how pragmatic sociology contains tools for an integrated conceptualisation of professional authority in action. This conceptualisation, in turn, allows one to inquire simultaneously into professions’ work of public justification of their expertise; negotiations over state and other governance forms; and workplace-level engagements into the shaping of new senses of judgment via embodied learning. As such, I suggest, pragmatic sociology enriches and specifies Abbott’s and others’ models of change in professional work, organisation, and regulation.

While falling short of a full empirical or comparative analysis, drawing my illustrations from three expert task domains serve the purpose of grounding these conceptual arguments provisionally in diverse professional settings. More specifically, it serves also to question widespread tendencies to (over-)generalised pronouncements on the wholesale decline in professional authority since the 1960s (e.g. Carvalho et al., 2018). At one level, along with Larson’s assessment (2018), my pragmatic sociology reading of the Danish case studies leads to the assertion that commitments to professionalism and professional authority as a long-standing principle of societal problem-solving still seem widespread. This is true while, at another level, our cases also show important variation in the extent to which different professional segments succeed in justifying and negotiating the widening, maintenance, or halting of erosion in the depth and scope of their authority, amidst the intensification of what Thévenot (2009) dubs a government by objective objectives. Indeed, as part of what pragmatic sociology calls an instrumented civic-industrial compromise, professional authority emerges as an enduring yet inherently ambivalent and situationally contested feature of political (late-)modernity writ large (Eyal, 2019). This is a situation in which professions are indeed ‘under siege’ (Carvalho et al., 2018), in the sense of having to constantly re-justify, re-specify, and re-adjust their authority vis-à-vis each other, the state, clients, organisational managers, and others. One should not confuse such active and on-going contestability, however, with any wholesale decline in authority.

These observations, in turn, pertain to cross-jurisdictional variations in professional authority and its trajectories of change within one society, resonant here with prior work on professionalism in Scandinavia as attuned to the changing exigencies of the welfare state (Bertilsson, 1990; see Blok et al., 2019). While beyond the scope of our study, further variations are likely at work, perhaps in more pronounced ways, also cross- and trans-nationally, given the historical specificities of the instrumented compromises of professional authority, and indeed in how the professional is conceptualised as a ‘folk concept’ in different societies (see Freidson, 1986). Here, as I suggest in my review, Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991[2006]) own conception is no doubt informed by its French and, by implication, ‘state-dominant’ continental European setting, as opposed to Anglo-American ‘market-dominant’ professionalism. Follow-up work may take inspiration from existing comparative uses of pragmatic-sociological tools (e.g. Moody & Thévenot, 2000) to further nuance this agenda, attuned to how political cultures of institutionalised justificatory repertoires and dominant state-professional forms shape variable compositions of professional authority. Doing so might also engage pragmatic sociology into the study of transnational professional governance, in that expert-based forms and standards are increasingly worked out on scales that no longer assume the nation-state as their sole sphere of application (Thévenot, 2019). Altogether, unlike purely political-philosophical assertions (e.g. Schudson, 2006), pragmatic-sociological considerations are prone to support the claim that questions of professional authority – its degrees of ambivalence, decline, or reassertion at organisational and wider democratic levels – likely show significant cross- and trans-national variations.

In further working out this comparative research agenda, pragmatic-sociological tools offer valuable insights, I believe, not only into professional authority strictly speaking, but also on the wider question of the ambiguous place of expertise in (late-)modern public life, caught as this often is in-between technocratic realities and democratic aspirations (Eyal, 2019). Here, pragmatic sociology stands out for its attention to the uncertain situations of coordination, multiple and partly incompatible moral conventions, and registers of engagement of varying organisational scopes at stake in any democratically accountable reliance on expert judgment, necessary as this latter undoubtedly is (Schudson, 2006). In particular, by attending to those ‘informal’ aspects of coordination grasped by Thévenot (2009) in the register of familiar engagement, a pragmatic-sociological re-theorization of expertise suggest a novel terrain on which to conduct epochal debates on trust in and the authority of expertise. Put briefly, and paraphrasing Peter Wagner’s (1994, p. 274) felicitous pragmatic-sociological definition of ‘society’, this is a terrain in which expert-professional authority in its relation to democracy is cast not as an encompassing social order or unitary political-administrative system, but rather as multiple agreements, as well as persistent disputes, of varying extensions, durability, and substance. The democratic accountability of expert-professional authority, we might say with Thévenot, has plural yet always disputable sources, and must itself be continually tested out and readjusted through processes of critique, justification, and compromise, at local, national, and global scales.

In view of these broader possibilities, the more modest and initial purpose of the present article has been to sketch and illustrate the general contours of a pragmatic sociology of expert jurisdictional engagement, professional authority, and their contemporary changes. More than related terms such as power, credibility or legitimacy, the notion of authority, I believe, is well suited for this line of inquiry precisely for its ability to point to the problematic and non-obvious, yet also stubbornly resilient qualities of professionalism as a still influential mode of societal problem-solving in political (late-)modernity (Arendt, 1961; Larson, 2018). Pragmatic sociology, I have tried to show, thrives on just such tension and ambiguity – as does, in the end, a competent democracy concerned with a plurality of non-coherent values.

The author thanks his three fellow inquirers on the Global challenges, local solutions? project, Maria Duclos Lindstrøm, Marie Leth Meilvang and Inge Kryger Pedersen, for kindly collaborating to share the empirical insights underlying this paper’s theoretical claims. He also thanks participants at the Citizens in the Making (CIM) workshop in Helsinki, December 10–11 2019, for helpful suggestions.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).