Social housing managers and the performance ethos: towards a 'professional project of the self'

In sociology, the proffesional project is understood as a collective endeavour of occupational groups that only succeeds if those groups possess, and control access to a unique stock of knowledge. Urban sociologists have been critical of public housing managers' collective endeavours to present themselves as proffesion became they use generic knowledge and common sense in their work. They also argue that the proffesional project of housing management is being further undermined by the performance ethos', since this now allows service managers to exert even more control ovcer what public housing managers do and thus de-skills them even more. Our argument is that this analysis of the impact of the performance ethos is based on a conceptually limiting view of power as as repressive force that enforces 'blanket restrictions' on group activity, i.e., what proffesional groups are free to do. Conversely, we adopt a Foucauldian view of power because it better explains our research findings. Foucault suggests that power does not simply repress group activity. Power is also appropriated by individuals who use it ti redefine themselves in productive ways to acheive their own individual ends (i.e. to work on their professional project of the self is emerging in housing management that has not yet been adequately captured in the sociological literature.