| Abstrakt: |
The paper argues that deskilling of professional services creates a paradoxical situation. While the replacement of skilled workers with a combination of unskilled laborers and expertise-encapsulating technology allows firms to reduce the cost of labor and, most importantly, to access the benefits of scale, the very absence of professionals makes it difficult for the firms to then sell the services as professional services. This paper suggests a mechanism by which the paradox, heretofore unaddressed in the discussions of standardization and deskilling of professional service work, is resolved in practice. Using a case of tax preparation work in the U.S., the paper demonstrates that professional identity can emerge in non-professional, low-status workers in the context of low-paying, standardized, deskilled professional work. Using in-depth interviews (N=50) and a field-based survey-experiment (N=437), the paper investigates the emergence of the pseudo-professional identity and finds that because professionalism is a strong cultural concept that does not require actual professionalization to be effective, playing a professional may be equivalent to being one. The paper further finds that poor work conditions that would seem inadequate for a claim of professional practice and that ostensibly contradict and inhibit professional identity, may promote and sustain it. The paper concludes with a discussion of pseudo-professional identity as a form of organizational control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
