COVID-19 and the culture of professions: Issues and tensions in the group of health professionals
Résumé
This chapter focuses on the group of professionals who have been in the very frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic: the medical profession. It discusses this group in regard to the notion of “the culture of professions”. The culture of the medical profession, symbolically forged by an oath and the imagined “milieu” of hospitals, is informed by an activity and values which expose them to sanitary risks whatever their working conditions. This study draws on an approach from the information and communication sciences in regard to social representations in the media, a sociological approach to professional groups, and socio-history. It aims to elucidate how the pandemic has remodelled, reinforced and/or fragilised the specific culture of the medical profession – from the first lockdown periods to the period of sanitary passes and vaccination, the latter having been particularly divisive, creating new tensions between personal culture and professional culture. The study investigates, in chronological order, the period of hypermediatised and dramatised praise, the period of vital on-site work in the face of the impossibility to work remotely, and finally, the period of contradictions and division due to the vaccine policy.