ABSTRACT

The vision of what it means to be a professional has changed profoundly in last decades. Previously, professionals were expected to appropriate the shared knowledge of the trade and to enter clearly defined roles in a traditional professional culture. Today, we are facing an era where the professional "self" is constituted as an autonomous, innovative and overriding self, expected to bear the brunt of producing new knowledge as well as creating new relationships of trust and commitment in a global knowledge economy. In this paper the authors discuss how new kinds of work identities are offered to students of two professions in Norway, namely nurses and computer engineers. Recently a new curriculum has been passed for both these groups making them an interesting site for studying emerging visions of the professional self. Using concepts and ideas introduced by Foucault and his followers as a lens for our analysis, we discuss how the formulation of goals, activities and evaluation procedures in the curricula take the form of endless demands on the learning self; constructing the students as creators of knowledge, boundary crossers, and innovators of self and ethics.