Shifting Heuristics in the Sociological Approach to Professional Trustworthiness

Abstract

The aim of this article is to raise social-scientific awareness about the growing disenchantment with basic assumptions about the progressive outcomes of western-styled ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’ and how western society is standing up to such a disquieting historical trajectory and facing the challenge of other emerging models. As there is no doubt that only a substantial cultural change could counteract the trend, the article deals with that part of the western epistemic community that embodies the highest cultural capital, namely learned professions, by asking what theoretical and practical limits are they reaching? Are they accountable for the ongoing general situation? Are their knowledge, commitment and performance socially adequate? If not, do professional work, action and trustworthiness require new analytical, social and moral foundations? A plausible answer to these questions seems to be offered by the abandonment of traditionally dominant formal-rational methodology, a return to the concept of substantive rationality and the appraisal of the multidisciplinary advancements provided by sociology of science. In this respect, the analysis stresses the limits of dominant sociological approaches to professions, by centring on the notion of status-role and by enlightening the pivotal importance of the indeterminacy of knowledge as primary professional traits of professionalism. Consequently, it suggests the need for a radical theoretical revision of common views about sources, forms and degrees of socioprofessional reliability, trustworthiness and confidence, given the fact that such a revision is anyhow required in practice by the new trajectories of the profession power–knowledge nexus in the age of the risk–knowledge society.