Responding to change: the case of community pharmacy in Great Britain

In recent years pharmacy has increasingly striven sharply to define and establish its role in the face of technological advance. The pre‐packaging of medicines by the pharmaceutical industry and the use of computers in pharmacies and general practitioners’ surgeries would seem to obviate pharmacists’ traditional activities in the compounding and dispensing of medicines, and challenge their claim to professional status with an associated decline in their social and economic rewards. This paper draws on the literature of the sociology of the professions to analyse the response of this occupational group to threats to its status as a professional primary health care provider. It is argued that pharmacy has the necessary knowledge base to control the symbolic transformation of the pharmacological entity—the drug—into the social object—the medicine, yet has failed to capitalise on this when attempting to define its professional role.