The institutional culture of community colleges often fosters a professional identity among faculty members that sees research, publication, and other forms of out-of-class scholarship as detrimental to teaching and student learning. But the professional associations established by and for community college faculty members in specific academic disciplines have forged a path to an alternative professional identity that recognizes disciplinary scholarship as an essential part of faculty work. This chapter examines how the associations have fostered the social conditions for the development of this alternative professional identity.