When employment status shapes professionalism. The case of the academic labour market in Switzerland

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In the classical sociology of professions literature, professionalism issaid to exist when a group of workers achieve a monopoly over a givenset of tasks, and determines the manner in which the latter should bestbe carried out. Within this task-based approach, the employment statusof professionals is something that is rarely addressed. In this chapter,we argue that an employment-based perspective might be a potentiallyfruitful way of analyzing professionalism. It offers the opportunity ofmoving beyond the study of occupational "boundary work", and of focusingon different forms of occupational segregation and segmentation. Basedon the analysis of the recent changes within the Swiss higher educationsector, we show how studying the employment conditions of academics inthe early stages of their careers provides an original window on thedifferentiation processes that occur *within* professions. We argue thatprecarious employment conditions are associated with lower levels ofidentification with a task-based model of professional identity.