Professions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate and discuss potential reasons why the internal auditing (IA) profession has been marginalized in the governance debate on solutions after the financial crisis that started in 2007, also noting recent studies questioning the value of IA’s work. The key aim of this paper is to make readers aware of ambiguities concerning the ultimate customer of IA and its core business, and to stimulate critical reflection thereon.

Design/methodology/approach – The conceptual discussion of this paper is based on an objective review of relevant literature, both practitioner and academic.

Findings – Positioning IA as agent to the board/audit committee and, at the same time, as partner to management is challenging in practice. The IA function should clarify the customer dimension in ist organizational context. Furthermore, this paper argues for a consolidation of internal audit around ist core function of providing assurance when seeking to establish IA as a profession.
Practical implications – Practitioners will benefit as this paper demands fundamental questions to be addressed in the organizational context, about the ultimate customer and the core business of the IA service rendered. The Institute of Internal Auditors will benefit from this paper and subsequent discussions in academia and practice, supporting its pursuit to gain universal recognition for IA as a profession.

Originality/value – This paper may open a new research area in IA that addresses a more critical way of evaluating IA practices.
Keywords Internal auditing, Corporate governance, Professions

Paper type Conceptual paper

Roman Catholic women's congregations are an enigma of nineteenth-century social history. Over ten thousand women involved in these congregations have been rendered invisible in history. Despite their exclusion from historical texts, these women featured prominently in negotiating the boundaries of religious life, sometimes to their collective benefit, sometimes not. Prescriptive literature gave one model of womanhood, married life, with a second model, single life, clearly an inauspicious alternative. Women religious provided a different model and created a religious, occupational and professional identity that varied from the prescriptive literature of the day. Their religious identity had as its goal their own ‘perfection’ and the salvation of others. Their occupational identity as ‘nun’ often encompassed a wide variety of tasks, but by the end of the century, the professional identity of nun as teacher or nurse was firmly in place.

More and more reforms in public administrations are being conducted that are based on the principles and instruments of "new public management". They have set off protest and collective actions by several professional groups in various sectors (health, education, justice, social work, research. . .), whence questions about the future of professional groups in public services, in particular about their autonomy, which these reforms threaten. The opposition between this new public management and certain professional groups, is not the final explanation to draw from an analysis of this situation. Should these changes be seen as the decline of professional groups and of their autonomy, as a mutation of professional models, an overhaul of professionalism, etc.? These questions, which current events in France and Europe have raised, are a matter for ongoing sociological thought. They are approached empirically, from the field, using varied scales of analysis and research. Forms of tension between this new public management and professional groups are explored.

The Italian system of professions is characterized by strong disparities between professionals recognized by the state and non-regulated professions, dividing professionals in terms of protection from market and personal risks. As a consequence, the absence/presence of public regulation is not neutral, but has a direct impact on three factors: education and training, acknowledgement, and welfare integration.This article address this issue explaining the divergences between self-employed representatives of two professions (architects and management consultants), considered as idealtypical examples of those disparities. The investigation has confirmed strong cleavages in terms of education and welfare system access, but not in terms of acknowledgement, that still represents an issue for both the professionals considered. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that this fragility is partially balanced by a growing interest in self-organization, which acts as a convergent strategy for both regulated and non-regulated professionals in order to deal with increasing instability in the market and social vulnerability.

To some undergraduate students the most scientific professions are those related to the "hard sciences", such as physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and medicine. Social sciences and the humanities are, except for a few students' opinions, away from being considered as scientific. Such perception is tightly interrelated with the social representations of science and the person who does scientific research; beliefs that show similar concepts of science and stereotyped images of the scientific. We used several instruments to generate the information from the students and analyzed it through qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Poland is undergoing a major systemic shift: from centrally planned toward a market economy. All dimensions of societal life are involved in the change. The paper discusses the social role of the Polish managers currently against the background of what it used to be like under communism from a social constructivist perspective. The role is considered from the point of view of the actors: how they construct their role.

Eje temático: Pertinencia social del saber científico educativo Resumen En la complejidad de pensamiento -diría Morin-que implica poner en interrelación o en juego conceptos tan complejos en sí mismos como pertinencia, saber y ciencia, las reflexiones o análisis pueden resultar de igual manera y perderse por tanto, en el juego de las relatividades. Por ello, a la luz de un trabajo de investigación en marcha con fines de titulación doctoral, el eje temático en que se inscribe el presente trabajo generó la necesidad de intentar abonar a la claridad o a la toma de acuerdos iniciales sobre el papel que juegan hoy en día la pertinencia social, los saberes y la ciencia en las universidades públicas, incluidas en la denominación genérica de Instituciones de Educación Superior (IES), máxime cuando tales instituciones son el blanco permanente de una multiplicidad de demandas o expectativas sociales (la OCDE, 2008, las denomina y reconoce como una "mixture of many demands"). ¿Cómo entender pertinencia social en zonas de demandas sociales localizadas frente a un orden que se impone global? ¿Cómo se vinculan pertinencia social y saber científico? ¿En cuáles casos es posible vincularlos y para qué? Pero sobre todo, ¿cuáles son las prácticas específicas que se requieren para abandonar el campo teórico de estos temas e incidir en la transformación del entorno? Lo que aquí se expone intenta indicar los caminos a probables respuestas.

This article is an analysis of conditions enabling the rise of the professional field of medicine in Sweden. The analysis is based mainly on secondary data, while the use of primary data is restricted to official statistics. Primarily, it aims to study the conditions promoting professionalization in medicine. Important exogenous conditions were derived from early emerging nation state administration structures concerning policy and governance of public health, as well as a delegated supervision of professional health activities to the medical profession and the organization of a public national health care system. Professionalization strategies such as social organization of the medical profession and their use of a variety of legitimizing resources as tools for jurisdictional claims are considered as endogenous conditions. Broadly, the analysis shows a close relationship between the growth of professionalization in the field of medicine and the development of state prosperity in the Swedish welfare state.

This paper takes up the self-construction of the social roles of Polish IT professionals. We conducted an ethnographic study and observed that many of our interviewees defined their roles by negation and by invoking the internal and often hermetic aspects of their profession. Labeling this practice “holding up the shield,” we trace its archetypical roots. The recurrent use of this practice makes a change in agency in the process of constructing the role possible, to the benefit of the IT professionals.

Scientology’s greatest battle. Scientology emerged from Dianetics, which Hubbard hoped would replace the psychiatric profession. In this article, we discuss how Scientology attempted to position itself as a rival profession to psychiatry and the consequences of those attempts. Scientology’s battle with psychiatry gained some success from the social conditions during which it emerged, but it continues in a time that has seen increasing success with various psychiatric treatments. As such, Scientology’s direct influence on the psychiatric profession may be difficult to measure, but its actions have coincided with substantial challenges to psychiatry.

An ongoing issue of the membership of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society concerns efforts to educate audiences about human factors and ergonomics (HF/E). One important group to consider is students taking a beginning or introductory psychology course. The initial course in psychology usually reviews the scope of psychology and is taken by large numbers of individuals. In the present research, introductory psychology textbooks (n=123) published between 1969 and 2006 were consulted to identify the nature and extent of the coverage of HF/E. A clear increase in coverage was evidenced beginning in 1995. Although HF/E is now being mentioned significantly more often in newer texts, it is frequently limited in both amount and scope. The potential growth of graduate HF/E programs may be affected by the extent to which potential applicants are exposed to the discipline. Implications for HF/E are discussed and opportunities for increasing student exposure are identified.

This article examines the role of institutional factors in shaping the integration paths of migrant health professionals. For this purpose, it draws on two studies focusing on Filipino and Indian nurses working in the UK which rely on quantitative and qualitative methods, including a web survey and semi-structured interviews. The analysis shows that inequalities have arisen from differentiation processes induced by changes in the institutional settings. Furthermore, inequalities are often reflected in poor working conditions. The authors have identified restrictive rules on immigration and access to the profession as a source of uncertainty, and reveal the differentiation of entry paths, with those arriving through an international recruitment agency more frequently disappointed with their working conditions.