Professionalization and market closure : the case of plumbing in India

Abstract

While professionalization has long been understood as a process of establishing market closure and monopoly control over work, this paper presents a case where professionalization erodes rather than establishes occupational closure. Using the case of plumbing in India, I demonstrate how the Indian Plumbing Association (IPA), a newly formed organization of internationally-trained plumbing contractors and consultants, is using the rhetoric and structures of professionalization to threaten pre-existing ethnicity-based closure enjoyed by traditional plumbers from the eastern state of Orissa. By employing a discourse of professionalism and by instituting codes, training and certification programs, professionalization in this case is hurting Orissan plumbers by changing the basis of plumbing knowledge and opening entry to outsiders. This paper concludes by suggesting that professionalization is a modern trope that does not necessarily imply monopoly benefits and higher job quality for all the members of a given occupational group.