Professionalism and the disciplinary control of occupational therapists at the margins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Occupational therapy’s goal of professional status comes with costs. Sociologists argue that ‘professionalism’ exhorts workers to conform with normative expectations for behaviour and performance, becoming a mechanism of social control. Those performative expectations are established by socially dominant groups, constructing occupational therapists from marginalized groups as not-professional, unless they can contort themselves to conform. Here we explore the specific behaviours and forms of embodiedness that become encoded as ‘professional’ in occupational therapy, leaving particular groups of occupational therapists subject to discipline through the concept of ‘unprofessional’. We conducted a critical interpretive synthesis of literature indexed in CINAHL and EBSCOhost defining professional behaviour in occupational therapy (n=26). We also draw from in-depth qualitative interviews with 20 Canadian occupational therapists who self-identified as racialized, ethnic minority, disabled, 2SLGBTQ+, and/or from working-class/impoverished family origins, exploring how ‘professionalism’ serves to discipline and control them. For both approaches, we employed reflexive thematic analysis. Texts encode professionalism as specific behaviours and forms of embodiedness grounded in white, western politics of respectability. Some also exhort occupational therapists to never make the profession ‘look bad’. In our interview data, occupational therapists from marginalized groups risked being construed as ‘unprofessional’ by having the ‘wrong’ bodies, appearances, presentation of self, speech language use, emotions, behaviours, and boundaries. When ‘professionalism’ demands assimilation to normative standards that exclude particular kinds of people, we narrow the potential of occupational therapy to encompass diverse valuable ways of doing, being, becoming and belonging. There is an important role for ‘professional resistance.’
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".