"This middle-class professionalism is now under attack — lawyers largely exempted — and in the process of being destroyed. The attack comes from several angles, which may be summed up as invasion by managerialism. It involves a relative devaluation of specialist knowledge, a loss of respect for it. In practice, this means first of all a subordination of professionals, teachers, researchers, physicians, nurses, engineers, and others, to administrative managers, in schools and universities, hospitals, and enterprises.

The practice of professional knowledge is submitted to auditing, evaluations, and sanctions by managers, deriving from an institutionalized mistrust of professional autonomy and of professional ethics. Professional cognitive practice and ethics are subjected to pervasive cost- benefit calculations, often specially invented ones of internal quasi-markets, such as university administrations charging university departments for the use of university premises. These cost-benefit inventions are also part of a particularly heavy anti-professional attack under the banner of commerce."