"Being Red but Not Professional": Professional Autonomy and the Construction of State Hegemony

Abstract

Background: China is building a new governance model, including the reconstruction of the profession. The Chinese government has made comprehensive efforts to shape the various emerging social professions. China’s emerging social work profession is a good case in point. As professionals, social workers play an important role in building a harmonious socialist society. But during the development, under the “localization discourse”, its ideology has been reconstructed and restricted. ideological proletarianization theory believed that the compromise of ideology could bring professional autonomy at the technical level. However, although China’s social work profession tries to actively integrate into the state dominating ideology, it has not gained professional space for developing knowledge and techniques autonomously, and is questioned as “red but not professional”. Therefore, this article attempted to further analyze this state-profession relationship by integrating ideological proletarianization and hegemony.

Methods: Using the Chinese social work profession as the case, we studied 754 rural social workers by building and testing a structural equation model. Of those total respondents, 79.3% were female (n = 598), mean age was 31 years old, 43.8% had assistant social work licensing (n = 330) and 30.8% held an associate bachelor’s or a bachelor’s degree in social work (n = 232).

A conventional two-step strategy was implemented. First, we used confirmatory factor analysis with maximum likelihood estimation to exam the construct validity of the four latent variables proposed. Second, we built a structural equation model and tested it to examine the direct and indirect relationships among the four latent variables and the hypotheses about mediation. Finally, the moderating effects of professional qualifications and higher education background were further tested.

Results: Four core latent variables: Professional social values, Individual work meaning, technical autonomy, and service impact were analyzed. The results showed that individual work meaning and professional values were each significantly and positively associated with services impact (β = 0.45*** and β = 0.26***, respectively). Professional autonomy was significantly and positively associated with services impact (β = 0.14**). However, the significant relationship between individual work meaning and professional values on services impact became less significant (β = 0.39*** and β = 0.21***, respectively) when the intermediary role of technical autonomy was added, and its intermediary effect was limited. having professional qualifications strengthened the relationship between the individual work meaning to the individual worker and that worker’s services impact (β = 0.442***VS β =0.274***).

Implications: These findings show for the social work profession, ideological proletarianization does not bring technical autonomy, which revises Derber’s point. Even if professionals lack professional autonomy, however, the state can still use the construction of pedagogical hegemony to prompt professionals to carry out services, so that they can better serve the improvement of the legitimacy of governance. If the loss of ideological autonomy cannot be exchanged for technical autonomy, and if pedagogical hegemony can prompt semiprofessionals or paraprofessionals to achieve a service effect, then being red but not professional may not be a transitional state but instead may have begun to be gradually finalized.