Counter-professionalization as an occupational status strategy: The production of professionalism in Israeli child-care workers’ identity work

Recent approaches to professions and professional identity question the premise that professionalization is the ultimate generator of status, showing that the classical model of professionalization does not always coincide with workers’ creative construction of professionalism and professional dignity. Extending these approaches, and focusing on workers’ identity discourse, this study examines how private child-care workers in Israel claim professional status precisely by avoiding formal professionalization and promoting a counter-professionalization ethos. Drawing on field observations and interviews, we analyze nannies’ tacit occupational community dynamics, by which they establish professional rules and boundaries and discursively construct a respected professional self. Their identity-talk reveals a vocational self-imaging based on personal charisma, one that resists training and credentials. This vocational self-imaging allows rebuttal of the nanny stereotype as a low-class uneducated workforce, associated with their ethnicized backgrounds, by symbolically transforming it and using it as a high-value identity resource. This counter-professionalized identity-talk prevails despite the social distinction between senior and junior nannies. Thereby, nannies gain professional status while the professionalization of child care is rejected. The analysis of these cultural dynamics provides a stronger perspective on professions as spheres of identity construction—specifically those ranked lower as unskilled labor—and on workers’ agency behind their ostensibly passive compliance with under-professionalization.