Traditional attempts to define professionalism, removed from the context of its practice, offer limited insight to its meaning. This chapter looks at the further education (FE) practitioner as a ‘case in point’ (Robson 1998). It explores two contrasting notions of the FE professional, as either the recipient or agent of change, reflecting the wider positioning of professionalism as a socially defined or situationally constructed process. The former denotes issues of structure in terms of how the professional is ‘framed’ by external factors and the latter focuses on agency in the way professionals construct meaning in the situated contexts of their work (Hoyle 1995). While the two are not mutually exclusive categories, there exists a dualism in sociological thinking between agency and structure around the way professionalism is understood (Grace 1995). In addressing this dualism the chapter critically examines various ways in which FE professionals intersect agency and structure in their work. All names are pseudonyms. © 2009 Sharon Gewirtz, Pat Mahony, Ian Hextall and Alan Cribb. All rights reserved.
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