This introductory article provides the background and clarifies the concepts and questions to be addressed in the articles that follow. It begins with a section examining how trust and professionalism have been linked in the sociological literature on the professions. The second section outlines a different interpretation of profession and professionalism, which explains how these concepts are increasingly used as discourses of occupational change and social control. The article concludes by examining the consequences of a focus on the discourse of professionalism for the intellectual field of sociology of professional groups and of the claim that there has been a decline of trust, competence and discretion in professional work.
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