Between academization and good craftmanship. The physiotherapists' ambition to professionalize in the light of the conductive education challenge

During the 1990s, a debate took place in Sweden concerning Conductive Education. Proponents of this method focused their critique on the role and methods of physiotherapists but this profession was not active in the debate. Instead, the medical profession came out as defenders of habilitation services and methods. Departing from sociology of the professions, our objective in this article is to analyze the physiotherapists’ silence in relation to the profession's position and its relation to the medical profession. The analysis is based on data from interviews with members of habilitation teams and other key persons, and on documents. The relative silence of physiotherapists is found to be related to both interprofessional factors (the subordination under the medical profession paired with a symbiotic relation based on common interests) and intraprofessional ones (the heterogeneity of the physiotherapist profession, their role in teamwork, and a change from a specialist to a generalist orientation).