Technical or professional? What is the opinion of the people involved? The case of employment and local development agents

Abstract

Since a new labour activity appears —employment or occupation— until it comes to be regarded as a profession, there are many difficulties this has to overcome. In this text we focus our interest in analyzing the difficulties on one labour activity that appeared in the last decades of the twentieth century with the objective of generate employment and local development or what is the same, the activity of AEDL (agents of employment and local development) in its process of recognition as a profession. Based on what it will be presented throughout this article we will seek to know the perception of this collective, the reality of their professional situation, and their chances of becoming profession. To do this, we use the information from a recent research (2008-2011) from the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology from the University of Valencia. Specifically, we use the results of the performance of 7 discussion groups bringing together 43 local development agents in the Valencia Region.