Professionalizing corporate professions: Professionalization as identity project

Professional bodies have traditionally played a core role in professionalization, setting the ideals for professional identity, knowledge and practice. However, the emergence of corporate professions has problematized the role of the professional body in contemporary professionalization. This article examines the role of the professional body and its ability to resonate with practitioners’ professional identity construction through empirical analysis of public relations. The article introduces the concept of professionalization as identity project as another means by which to understand attempts at social closure in emergent corporate professions. For professionalization as identity project to be fully realized, the research suggests the blending of traditional discourses of professionalism with emergent discourses of entrepreneurialism is required. Consequently, the study highlights that corporate professionalization as identity project reflects the contemporary tensions and contradictions between the lived reality and orthodox ideology of ‘being a professional’

Public Relations, News Production and Changing Patterns of Source Access in the British National Media

This article aims to draw attention to the rising influence of professional public relations on the process of national news production in Britain and to discuss how this influence is affecting existing media-source relations. It notes that a wide range of organizations have begun adopting public relations as a means of achieving particular goals through media coverage. At the same time media institutions, operating under tighter editorial budgets, have become more dependent on information supplied by external sources. The two trends have resulted in the sudden growth of the professional public relations sector and changes to existing patterns of source access. How such trends are affecting various sources in their attempts to gain and manage media access is the debate that therefore takes up most of this piece. Is public relations simply another means by which institutional and corporate organizations are managing to secure access advantages, or is it providing new means whereby non-official sources can gain media access which was hitherto denied them