I am not an employee, am I then a professional? Work arrangement, professional identification, and the mediating role of the intra-professional network

Abstract

Professions face challenges from proliferation and dilution, two processes that challenge our understanding of what a profession is and what it means to be a professional. As a response, profession scholars are paying increasing attention to how individuals come to see themselves as a professional. We contribute to this evolving literature by investigating the relationship between work arrangements, that is, freelancing and employment, and professional identification. In so doing, we pay particular attention to the mediating role of an intra-professional network and three aspects that characterise such a network. We sample from journalists to investigate the relationships in question and employ structural equation modelling to test our hypotheses. We found no direct relationship between work arrangements and professional identification. However, we do observe that freelancers’ intra-professional network density is lower than that of employees. The consequence of this mediating mechanism, we found, was that they identified less with their profession than employees did. This paper shows that the type of work arrangement has important implications for professional identification.