Abstract
Let’s get this out of the way – this is a comprehensive, sweeping, and sophisticated book, and probably the best full-length book treatment of journalistic professionalism that I am aware of. The fact that it may be one of the only book-length treatments of journalistic professionalism does not detract from how good it genuinely is. Indeed, as the abundance of recent citations and lengthy bibliography make clear, the scholarly and public conversation about these topics may finally be maturing to such a degree that a book like this one is both possible and worthwhile. In short: Waisbord has the chance in this book to summarize and set the agenda for future research on journalistic professionalism, and he does not miss the opportunity.
The book, which is both rewarding and dense in the way that only ‘big-picture’ books of this kind can be, is driven by two primary arguments. The first is an attempt to reframe the conversation about journalism’s professional status around the notion of occupational jurisdiction. Rather than taking a trait-based or credential-based approach to understanding professionalism, in which a particular job possesses a certain number of professional-like characteristics and the total number of these traits is tallied up and compared to an ‘ideal’ list of professional characteristics, Waisbord wants us to think about professionalism as ‘a process by which occupations claim jurisdiction over a field of practice’ (p. 17). Following Andrew Abbott and Pierre Bourdieu (and ultimately Durkheim and Weber), professionalism is thus reframed to be an agent-driven, precarious, agonistic struggle for social, cultural, and economic prestige and autonomy.
The second major argument of the book is that journalistic professionalism can only be understood globally, and it is in this comparative context that Waisbord’s jurisdictional understanding of professionalism comes in handy. If professional journalism is understood as an occupational logic that orients itself toward idealism and public service, professional journalism cannot be seen as a global phenomenon. If it is understood, rather, as a jurisdictional struggle for control over work, then this struggle can be usefully analyzed in a comparative context. In short: seeing journalistic professionalism as a jurisdictional struggle allows us the ability to compare internationally; adopting a trait perspective does not.
Within this larger framework, the book’s progression is logical and efficient. Chapter One provides a comparative history of the journalistic professionalization process in the USA and Great Britain, distinguishing between the market (US) and public broadcasting paths (Britain). Chapter Two takes a fairly critical look at journalistic autonomy – while the presence or absence of jurisdictional autonomy is obviously the analytical framework adopted by Waisbord, this does not imply that professional autonomy is free of difficulty on either a normative or sociological level. Chapter Three returns to the question of jurisdiction through an overview of the literature in the sociology of the professions. In many ways, Chapter Four is the section of the book that most easily stands on its own: it is a cogent summary of critiques of professionalism from communitarian, Marxist, and Foucauldian perspectives. Chapters Six and Seven turn the analytic frame of the book towards a more global perspective, and Chapter Eight concludes the book where many less well-grounded sociologies of digital news begin, with a look at the challenge to professionalism posed by various 21st-century social, technological and economic developments.
Within the scope of the task he has set for himself – providing an overview of the contested status of journalistic professionalism, synthesizing the extant literature, and advancing a compelling theory for understanding professionalism in a sociological and comparative fashion – Waisbord has succeeded admirably. One might have hoped for more empirical material with which to flesh out the broad theoretical sketches, but such is not the purpose of this volume and one cannot fault books for being what they are rather than what we might wish them to be. Still, the research in this area, which is still in its early stages, has already contributed nicely to both the extension and problematization of some of Waisbord’s more general theoretical points. If journalistic professionalism is really the result of a jurisdictional struggle, what is the terrain upon which this struggle is carried out? What do journalists claim as their unique area of abstract knowledge? How do they ratify their professionalism through practice? How do they interact with other semi-professional journalistic actors?
Even these empirical questions, though, primarily demonstrate what a valuable service Waisbord has performed with Reinventing Professionalism. With much of the theoretical debris cleared away, organized, and expertly synthesized, we can at last turn to the next generation of questions that might animate academic research operating within the sociology of news tradition.