Book Review: Professionalism in Probation: Making Sense of Marketisation
| Author | Anne Worrall |
| DOI | 10.1177/20662203221087840 |
| Published date | 01 April 2022 |
| Date | 01 April 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
European Journal of Probation
2022, Vol. 14(1) 79–86
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/20662203221087840
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejp
Book Review
Professionalism in Probation: Making Sense of Marketisation. By Matt Tidmarsh. Abingdon: Routledge,
2022. 222 pp. ISBN: 978-0-367-62193-3 (£120 hbk)
Reviewed by: Anne Worrall, Keele University, Staffordshire, England
Professionalism is a slippery and contested concept. Historically associated with spe-
cialised knowledge, skills, values and authority, the expectation of belonging to a
profession is widely seen to involve recognised training, qualification, regulation, a sense
of vocation or service, and working primarily for the public good rather than personal gain
(though professional power and autonomy have always provided personal status).
Consequently, when professions become embroiled in marketisation, it is all too often
regarded as being antithetical to their core mission and inevitably a mark of de-
professionalisation.
In Professionalism in Probation, Matt Tidmarsh convincingly challenges this sim-
plistic analysis, arguing that we need to change our understanding of the concept of
professionalism, rather than bemoan its decline in the context of marketisation. While the
partial privatisation of the National Probation Service in England and Wales between
2014 and 2019 provides an excellent case study for examining this hypothesis, Tidmarsh’s
theoretical framework and empirical insights are applicable to other professional settings
such as education, social work and some aspects of medicine and law. The key common
ground between these occupations has been the rise of employees who are perceived to be
less well trained or qualified than traditional professionals and thus to have restricted areas
of competence, authority –and professionalism. Among these are Probation Service
Officers in England and Wales and it is the neglect of what professionalism means to this
grade of workers, particularly in a privatised context, that was the spur to Tidmarsh’s
research.
Tidmarsh is very generous in his comments about the research that Rob Mawby and I
undertook into the occupational identities and cultures of probation work (2013).
However, he rightly points out that we focused largely on ‘qualified’probation officers
and, although we were very much aware of the government’s policy of Transforming
Rehabilitation and the impending split in probation work, we knew that our research
could only ever be ‘of its time’and that others would need to build upon it, if they felt it
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