MANAGING PROFESSIONALS: Ideological Proletarianization and Post-Industrial Labor.

The article focuses on the growing stratum of professional employees and ideological proletarianization and post-industrial labor. The importance of this stratum in advanced societies is highlighted by post-industrial theorists who identify the salaried professionals as the major protagonist of the coming post-industrial society and by Marxist theorists, including theorists of the new working class, professional-managerial class, new petty-bourgeoisie class, new class and others who also conceive the employed professional as a key new actor in contemporary capitalism. The argument here has been that professionals are increasingly subject to management control, but a different type than that experienced by industrial workers. The distinction between ideological and technical proletarianization points to both parallels and contrasts between industrial and professional workers and suggests limitations of the Marxist and post-industrial theories of professionals as currently formulated. Proletarianization theorists argue that professional autonomy, under the emerging conditions of proletarianization, assumes largely symbolic forms. Post-industrialist theorists have pointed out grave problems with simple analogies to craft proletarianization, however, and explicitly reject images of the factory or industrial life as appropriate to the description of the professional work-place.