Australian Professionals: Capitalism, Identity, and the Transformation of the Middle Class

In 1881, less than 3% of Australian workers were professionals. By 2001, this was around 25%. In the recent past, professional work by educated ‘white collar’ employees rose to approximately 40% of the Australian workforce. Three phases of the history of professions align to shifts in capitalist accumulation and middle-class culture. Firstly, the initial professionalisation of the economy (c.1870-1945) was linked to the growth of finance capital and Australia’s mining industry, also drawing on older British middle class values to provide moral justification for the settler-colonial project. In the mid-twentieth century, the professionals negotiated between the state and new corporate structures to re-shape the post-war economy – and society – in their own image. While the ‘social wage’ of the era (c.1945-1975) delivered actual salaries to professionals, it was their social power that most characterized changes in this period, which in turn attracted critique by New Left and later, Foucauldian scholars. In the 1970s as the economy globalized, the professions experienced a crisis. New growth patterns represented a change not only in the economic conditions that underpinned class relations, but also in the ideas that the professionals attached to the moral nature of their work. In resolving this, personal morality became disaggregated from professional work, undermining the traditional legitimacy of professional expertise in the public sphere. A new managerial strata emerged, asserting power over lower professional layers, destabilising class relations across the economy.

Australian historians of the politics of labor market and class relations have overlooked the middle class as a rising demographic of historical agents. This paper introduces research aimed at addressing this through a ‘new materialist’ intervention (Forsyth and Loy-Wilson 2017) that combines the traditional economic modes of labor history with discourse analysis of the changing self-perception of professionals in their associated publications and in popular culture.