Are you a professional living and working in an English-speaking country? If so, this episode is for you.

Whether or not you’re a professional yourself—and the term’s meaning varies based on time and space—you’ve likely come into contact with one recently. Teachers, doctors, nurses, accountants, engineers, lawyers, social workers, the list goes on, professionals play an important role in our society. According to the AFL-CIO’s Department for Professional Employees, professionals comprised nearly 60 percent of the total workforce in 2020, with 88.4 million people working across a wide variety of occupations.

That the AFL-CIO even has a Department of Professional Employees is noteworthy as it suggests professionals are part of the working-class. But is that right? Many professionals in the past and today are business owners – the doctor with a private practice, the private law-firm. Does this, instead make professionals capital?

Today’s episode deals with the question of the rise of professionals in the Anglophone world. Specifically it asks the question, are professionals a class? If so, how did that class come to be? Along the way, we’ll discuss the particular role that professionals played in the rise of settler colonialism in the U.S., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand; the relationship between the professions and virtue, not to be confused with being moral; racial, gendered, and class identities among professionals; and the intensifying battle between professionals and managers. Once seen as allied in administering the global welfare state, professionals and managers, in recent decades, have increasingly found themselves on opposing sides—a conflict made pronounced, in the United States, at least, by a series of recent teachers and nurses strikes, and much, much more.

Check it the episode here!

Hannah Forsyth is an Associate Professor of History at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney. She is the author of Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglo World, 1870-2008 and A History of the Modern Australian University. From 2017-2019, Dr. Forsyth was an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow.