Value judgements and values talk are central to the practices of professions. Most obviously, the politically potent - if sociologically questionable - notion of a profession as a self-regulating occupation that deploys expertise in the public interest has at its core the idea of professionals abiding by a necessarily value-saturated professional code (Johnson 1972). In addition, concepts important to particular professions - such as justice, amenity and health - are ineradicably value-inflected (Thomas 1987). In that way, values-talk is central to professional identity-formation. Given that identity is formed in part through boundary-definition and boundary-policing, it is clear that professional values-talk is not simply inward-looking. On the contrary, it appears to be used in a variety of ways to attempt to regulate relations with those that professionals come across in their working environments.Yet professionals do not have a clear field in which to espouse and enact values (Freidson 2001). Public policy - which ultimately sanctions, and can constrain, so much of a profession's authority - will itself be couched in the vocabulary of values, whatever realpolitik may sometimes motivate individual interventions or policies.
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