Remaking Professionals? How Associations and Professional Education Connect Professionalism and Organizations

This article highlights connections between professional and organizational logics
that might arise outside organizations, especially during professional education.
Traditionally, many professionals were educated and prepared for rendering services
and securing quality, irrespective of organizational surroundings. Contemporary service
surroundings force professional associations to ‘remake’ rank and file professionals, so
that professional behaviours become more ‘organizational’. Associations might change
educational programmes, for instance, so that their members learn about organizational
issues like efficiency, planning and leadership, working conditions, financing systems and
risks. Whether and how this really happens, is unclear, however. This article analyses
whether professional education connects professionals to organizational logics, and if so, how?
Conceptually, various associational mechanisms for connecting professional and
organizational logics are explored. Empirically, professional education is studied by
focusing on the education of British and Dutch medical doctors. By analysing their
education at three levels of analysis – educational guidelines, curricula and educational
practices – the article studies whether and how doctors are tied to organizational
issues. At each of these levels, it is concluded, changes occur, although most changes
are mainly concerned with didactic and competency-based educational philosophies.
To some extent, new connections between professionalism and organizations are
established, but primarily at the level of general guidelines. Although medical education
is reorganized, medical students are hardly equipped for organizational matters.