Prefigurative Occupational Activism: How Religion-Inspired Psychologists Transform Their Profession as a Means for Social Change

This study examines a distinctive form of occupational activism among psychologists who draw on religious traditions to reconstruct their profession as a vehicle for societal transformation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with two Israeli psychotherapist communities that integrate Jewish or Buddhist traditions into clinical practice, we track how practitioners within an individually focused profession pursue a broader social and moral vision while maintaining professional legitimacy. We introduce the concept of prefigurative occupational activism: transforming professions into platforms for social change by constructing alternative professional communities, relationships, identities, and practices that prefigure practitioners’ envisioned transformed society. Our analysis shows how this mechanism works through moralizing work across three interconnected spheres: with peers, they build alternative moral communities while anchoring themselves within existing professional institutions; with patients, they adopt an inside-out approach that transforms therapeutic relationships into exemplary spaces of ethical presence; and in public spaces, they leverage professional status to create demonstration projects of alternative social arrangements and diffuse their model across professional fields. We discuss how professions function as institutional bridges between micro-level transformation and broader social change while acknowledging the limits inherent in this process.