Honing and Framing Ourselves (individualizing and Organizing)
Honing and Framing Ourselves (Individualizing and Organizing)

Summary/Abstract: Developing a concept of professional self-identity and institutional peer-control and making it independent of empirical and third-party verification are two strategies reflecting the rise of professionalism. Both these concepts are purely formal and allow for an autonomous self-regulation of a professional community minimizing external influences. Honing ourselves is about the self-reflection of professionals caught in the networks and hierarchies as “parking lots” for their personalities. Developing the concept of professional self-identity requires continuous critical re-engineering of the Enlightenment project. The retreat of the state and the emergence of complex networks anchored sense-making within the professional community. Will a researchers, teachers and managers ever rise to the level of principled citizens of a scientific community? Will they answer the call for a civic sociology appealing to “educationists, sociologists, political scientists, clinical practitioners in psychology and medicine, nurses, communications and media specialists, cultural studies workers, and a score of other assorted disciplines”? (Denzin, Lincoln 2003: 635–6) Will they educate new entrepreneurs of identity?

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