%0 Journal Article
%T Ontological Jurisdiction and Professional Drift: A Sociological Analysis of De-Differentiation in Spiritual Care
%A Tim Mussche
%J Open Access Library Journal
%V 13
%N 7
%P 1-15
%@ 2333-9721
%D 2026
%I Open Access Library
%R 10.4236/oalib.1115662
%X Spiritual care occupations¡ªspiritual direction and professional chaplaincy chief among them¡ªoccupy a professional jurisdiction whose cognitive foundation is not a body of techniques but an ontological commitment: the claim that the phenomena they address (vocation, discernment, encounter, the experience of being addressed by something exceeding the self) are real in a manner not exhaustively reducible to intrapsychic process. Drawing on Abbott¡¯s theory of professional jurisdiction and DiMaggio and Powell¡¯s account of institutional isomorphism, this article argues that these occupations are undergoing a process of professional de-differentiation, by which a once-distinct jurisdiction loses its boundary and is progressively absorbed into the adjacent jurisdiction of psychotherapy and counseling. The mechanism is not external displacement but voluntary mimicry: practitioners adopt the lexicon, credentialing logic, and outcome-measurement regime of the therapeutic professions because these constitute the legitimated currency of the contemporary helping-profession field, and in doing so concede the very cognitive ground that constituted their jurisdiction. Locating this drift within the broader Weberian process of disenchantment and the rise of a therapeutic culture, the article identifies three isomorphic mechanisms operating across four domains of practice, and proposes that re-differentiation depends on the explicit re-articulation of what is here termed the profession¡¯s ontological jurisdiction. The analysis connects this re-articulation to the constructs of liminal competence and the recognition paradigm, offering a sociologically grounded account of how a contemplative profession might retain its distinctiveness.
%K Sociology of Professions
%K Jurisdiction
%K Institutional Isomorphism
%K De-Differentiation
%K Spiritual Care
%K Chaplaincy
%K Therapeutic Culture
%K Disenchantment
%U http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=152619