Keeping Faith

This book explores the negotiated nature of professionalism for counselor-therapists employed within higher education institutions. Using the tradition of grounded theorizing, it details the ways college counselors preserve professional ideals about service, identity and the nature of their work, despite managerial challenges to those ideals or incursions into associated professional practices. Interviews with over forty American counselors shed light on individual professionalization experiences and tactics and clarify the ways in which counselors are like and unlike other employed professional workers. The study offers scholars an empirical, case-based challenge to the adequacy of current theory in the sociology of the professions in accounting for the kind of care work that counselors perform. Its analysis of how counselors keep faith with their professional tradition despite contemporary conditions of employment, offers insight to counselors, counselor educators and college counseling administrators about ways to protect core professional efficacy in those who care for persons whilst avoiding professional burnout.