Public reforms and professional autonomy: how professional segments matter

Based on a socio-historical study of museum curators in France since 1945, this article shows how professional autonomy is not only the result of negotiations between group representatives and the state but also determined by interactions between intra-professional segments. Power struggles between regional and national-level museum curators-respectively local civil servants and a sub-category of a corps of high-ranking state civil servants called conservateurs du patrimoine (heritage curators)-have actually increased the impact of group collective action, and affected the course of public decision-making in this cultural area in the 1990s. What we call the "interplay" between professional segments is a symbolic process. In the case under study, interactions between segments helped unify the statuses of regional and national-level curators and increased their prerogatives. While contributing to recent research on relations between professionals and reforms of public services and administrations, the article leads to a reconsideration of the classic antinomy between professional group unity and diversity.