Profession för handen

The overall aim of this dissertation is to explain how and why chiropractors as a professional group were able to become licensed in the Swedish health care system during the period 1922-1999. Of specific interest is why it was the group of foreign-educated chiropractors that received licensing before both other groups of chiropractors with Swedish education and other alternative medicine professional groups. The focus of the investigation is on the chiropractors' own professional associations and their strategies for influencing the processes that lead to the professional group's licensing. The dissertation uses an archival ethnographic method and the most central source material consists of archival material, the state's public investigations, reports, parliamentary motions, government bills and parliamentary debates as well as various types of consultation responses. Newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements, submissions and debate articles have also been important sources. Based on Pierre Bourdieu, Andrew Abbott, Anne Witz and neo-Weberian professional theory, the study shows how chiropractors during the research period presented themselves as professionals, in what way they did this and how this was received by other actors. Furthermore, chiropractors' boundary work is made visible as expressed in a series of exclusions, closures and othering, as well as reactions to these from other professional groups. This is in turn placed in a relational and historical context. The dissertation's research area is particularly interesting because it partly makes visible how a previously excluded actor is made professional enough to obtain licensure, and partly it is the first dissertation of its kind that has studied chiropractic and chiropractors in a Swedish context.