Reflections on a communication journey into professionalism and organizing

Much research in the field of communication studies has evidenced a ‘performative turn’ in how it views professionalism, professionals, and the professions. This special issue, Opening up the meanings of ‘the professional’, professional organizations, and professionalism in communication studies, documents this process and lays out a research agenda in and from communication studies that can inform scholarship on professionalism and organizing. In addition to mapping out and contextualizing the multiple, contested meanings of professionalism, particularly in novel or ‘non-standard’ contexts, it shows how workers enact, negotiate, reify, and resist the meanings of professionalism in both aspirational and exclusionary ways. When we shift the focus from professional experts (and the institutional apparatus that protects their status, autonomy, and authority) to expertise, as Ashcraft suggests in her contribution to this special issue, scholarly analysis needs to account for an entire network of actors, ideas, instruments, and forms of organizing that allow for successful—or failed—performances of expertise and understand that those performances rest on economies of difference. Economies of difference are distinctions among the sorts of work, workers, and working that wield political power in that they implicate social structures and dictate how specialized expertise is and can be deployed and recognized. Economies of difference create and benefit from inequities. The articles in this special issue offer empirical and conceptual windows into the contested and messy performance of professionalism, how it serves as a resource for some and a constraint for others, and how its contemporary meaning is potentially disrupted.