Identity transactions and professional integration: social forms of access to labour markets

Abstract

For more than a century there has been interest in the definition and characterization of the significance of a profession, as has been shown in the work of various sociologists. The recognition by Durkheim [1] that “one day will come, when our social and political organization will have exclusively or almost exclusively a professional base” is the origin of the debate about what characterizes and can be called a profession. Different studies and approaches, particularly in the field of the sociology of professions, emerged throughout a large part of the 20th Century. From the 1930s to the 1950s the functionalist approach was predominant, having as its principal representatives Parsons and Merton. In the 1950s and 1960s, the interactionist approach appeared, as represented by Hughes and Strauss among other followers and, then, in the 1970s came the neo-Weberian and neo-Marxist approaches, which are associated with Freidson and Larson. Each of these approaches was based on different perspectives and thinking about the meaning of profession from the more structuralist and syncretic perspective defended by the functionalists to the predominantly diachronic and dynamic perspectives valued by the interactionists, which focused preferentially on economic and historical dimensions like the neo-Marxists and neo-Weberians…

In this paper, we intend to contribute to the debate on the hypotheses of transformations of the profiles of employability and professionalization of young graduates facing the labour market. Their enrolment in unpredictable itineraries of professional integration simultaneously and differently (re)configures patterns of employability and professionalization segments that is important to analyse. We will start by presenting the main traits of transformation of the educational contexts and labour markets, in order to bring light to the social structural conditions in which they enrol in those itineraries. Next, we will perform a reflection on how those professional itineraries are or not immune to the erosion of their identity references before the “trivialisation” and/or “inflation” of academic titles, on the one hand, and to the countless practices of labour deregulation and conditions for exercising a profession, on the other. Finally, a proposal to systematise the main social forms of access to employment/profession is presented, assuming two analytical axes in its conceptualisation: 1) social regulation and setting of professional jurisdictions; and 2) organisational and professional mobility. This is a typological essay, which identifies four “ideal types” of important labour markets for graduates: professional markets, internal markets, transitional markets and secondary markets (neoclassical sense).