Abstract
Professional work has traditionally relied on three types of employment: self-employment in the case of e.g., lawyers or medical doctors, large-scale firms or conglomerates in the case of e.g., engineers dependent on specialization, and governmental agencies and state-funded agencies for a range of experts including judiciary professionals, serving industry and society. In the change from a managerial capitalism, dominated by large-scale firms, to an investor capitalism, dominated by finance industry interests and logics, large firms tend to “de-conglomeratize” and governmental agencies are made suspicious of slowing down the economy and consuming tax money. Investor capitalism thus puts a pressure on both professionals but also tend to expose the middle class, the traditional recruitment ground for professional workers, to new economic risks. The chapter sketches the changes since the early 1970s to make the argument that investor capitalism and precarious professional work coincide in time and that investor capitalism represents a new conventional wisdom pertaining to professional work.
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Styhre, A. (2017). Investor Capitalism and the Decline of the Public Corporation and the Middle Class. In: Precarious Professional Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59566-5_2
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