Professionalism Reborn

Theory, Prophecy and Policy

Eliot Freidson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745614465
  9780745612805
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745666327
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is an original interpretation of the professions and the role of the professional in Western industrial societies today.

PART I

CLARIFYING THE ISSUES

1

The Theory of Professions: State of the Art¹

While professions have never been among the core topics for sociological theorizing, a surprising number of the most prominent English-language sociologists, from Herbert Spencer (1914, pp. 179–324) to Talcott Parsons (1968), have paid them rather more than glancing attention. Until recently, most sociologists have been inclined to see professions as honored servants of public need, conceiving of them as occupations especially distinguished from others by their orientation to serving the needs of the public through the schooled application of their unusually esoteric knowledge and complex skill. In contrast, representatives of the other social sciences have stressed quite different characteristics of the professions. Economists have been inclined to note the closed, monopolistic character of the professionalized labor market (Cairnes, 1887, pp. 66–7; Friedman, 1962, pp. 137–60). Political scientists have been inclined to concern about professions as privileged private governments (Gilb, 1966). And policy-makers have been inclined to see professional experts as overnarrow and insular in their vision of what is good for the public (Laski, 1931).

The 1960s marked a watershed in sociological writings on the professions. For one thing, the evaluative flavour of the literature has changed. Whereas most sociologists had earlier emphasized the positive functions and achievements of the professions (though they were not unaware of their deficiencies), recent writers have been consistently more critical. Furthermore, the substantive preoccupation of the literature changed. In the earlier literature, the major scholarly writers focused primarily on the analysis of professional norms and role relations and on interaction in work settings. While they all acknowledged the importance of political and economic factors, they did not analyze them at any length. The more recent scholarly literature, on the other hand, focuses on the political influence of professions (Freidson, 1988), on the relation of professions to political and economic elites and the state (Johnson, 1972), and on the relation of professions to the market and the class system (Larson, 1977).

But while there have been significant changes in the evaluative and substantive emphasis of sociological writings on the professions, they reflect changes in the content of theorizing while remaining unchanged in the nature of theorizing. This has been the case even though some of the recent criticism of the traditional approach has been metatheoretical in character. Unfortunately, those metatheoretical critiques have addressed either false issues or issues which are essentially insoluble because of the very nature of the concept of profession itself. For this reason, there has not been any significant advance in developing a theory of professions over the past decade or so that does not have as many deficiencies as past theories.

This is the point of the present paper. In it, I shall examine several common metatheoretical issues addressed by recent writings on the professions, and evaluate both their validity and their utility for advancing a theory of professions. In doing so, it will be necessary to address the concept of profession itself. The very nature of that concept, I shall argue, plays a critical role in creating some of the problems addressed by metatheoretical writings and precludes their solution in abstract, theoretical terms. The nature of the concept of profession, I shall argue, provides us with a limited number of options. The option that can lead to a coherent and systematic method of analysis is one that requires forsaking the attempt to treat profession as a generic concept and turning instead to formulating a generic conception of occupation within which we can locate analytically the particular occupations that have been labelled professions. To advance a theory of professions, however, requires a rather different option, which treats the concept as a historical construction in a limited number of societies, and studies its development, use, and consequences in those societies without attempting more than the most modest generalizations.

THE PROBLEM OF DEFINITION

Much debate, going back at least as far as Flexner (1915), has centered around how professions should be defined – which occupations should be called professions, and by what institutional criteria. But while most definitions overlap in the elements, traits, or attributes they include, a number of tallies have demonstrated a persistent lack of consensus about which traits are to be emphasized in theorizing (Millerson, 1964, p. 5). No small part of the criticism of the traditional literature on the professions has been devoted to pointing out a lack of consensus. Because we seem to be no nearer consensus than we were in 1915, and because usage varies substantively, logically, and conceptually (Freidson, 1977), some analysts have given the impression of condemning the very practice of seeking a definition. But surely such condemnation is inappropriate. In order to think clearly and systematically about anything, one must delimit the subject-matter to be addressed by empirical and intellectual analysis. We cannot develop theory if we are not certain what we are talking about.

One method of attempting to solve the problem of definition has been to deprecate the value of defining the characteristics of professions as “inherently distinct from other occupations” (Klegon, 1978, p. 268) and to urge instead discussing the process by which occupations claim or gain professional status. The outcome of such a position, however, is to avoid entirely any conscious definition while in fact covertly advancing an implicit and unsatisfactorily vague definition of a profession as an occupation that has gained professional status. What is professional status? How does one determine when it does and when it does not exist? What are its characteristics?

A closely related suggestion is to shift focus from a “static” conception of profession as a distinct type of occupation to the process by which occupations are professionalized (Vollmer and Mills, 1966). However, as Turner and Hodge (1970, p. 23) and Johnson (1972, p. 31) have correctly noted, an emphasis on process rather than structure, on professionalization rather than on the attributes of professions, does not really solve the problem of definition. To speak about the process of professionalization requires one to define the direction of the process, and the end-state of professionalism toward which an occupation may be moving. Without some definition of profession the concept of professionalization is virtually meaningless, as is the intention to study process rather than structure. One cannot study process without a definition guiding one’s focus any more fruitfully than one can study structure without a definition.

In all, the issue of definition for a theory of professions cannot be dealt with profitably either by denial or by avoidance. A word with so many connotations and denotations cannot be employed in precise discourse without definition. One can avoid the issue of definition only if one adopts the patently anti-analytical position that all occupations – whether casual day-labor, assembly-line work, teaching, surgery, or systems analysis – are so much alike that there is no point in making distinctions of any kind among them. That there are no differences of any analytic importance must be firmly denied.

Given the necessity of definition, one may note that the character of an adequate definition must be such as to specify a set of referents by which the phenomenon may be discriminated in the empirical world – that is, specifying attributes, traits, or defining characteristics. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency in the recent critical literature to confuse the act of specifying defining characteristics with the particular characteristics specified by earlier writers. One can criticize a definition because of the analytically and empirically ambiguous traits it singles out (Freidson, 1988), or because its traits have no systematic interrelations and no theoretical rationale (Johnson, 1972). But it is not the fact that a definition is composed of traits or attributes that can be justifiably criticized.

In all, then, it would seem that, in the present state of the art of theorizing about professions, recent comments on the issue of definition miss the mark. The definitional problem that has plagued the field for over half a century is not one created by squabbling pedants, to be solved by eschewing definition entirely. Nor is the problem created by the adoption of a static “structural” or “functional” approach, to be solved by a “process” or “conflict” approach. Nor is the problem created by including traits or attributes in a definition. The problem, I suggest, lies much deeper than that. It is created by attempting to treat profession as if it were a generic rather than a changing historic concept, with particular roots in an industrial nation strongly influenced by Anglo-American institutions.

THE PAROCHIALISM OF THE INSTITUTIONAL CONCEPT OF PROFESSION

In order to elaborate my argument about the nature of the concept of profession, it is necessary first of all to emphasize the difference between two very different usages which are sometimes confused. First, there is the concept of profession that refers to a broad stratum of relatively prestigious but quite varied occupations whose members have all had some kind of higher education and who are identified more by their educational status than by their specific occupational skills. Second, there is the concept of profession as a limited number of occupations which have particular institutional and ideological traits more or less in common. It is only this second concept which allows us to think of “professionalism” as, in Johnson’s terms, a way of organizing an occupation (Johnson, 1972, p. 45). It represents much more than only a status, for it produces distinctive occupational identities and exclusionary market shelters (cf. Parkin, 1979) which set each occupation apart from (and often in opposition to) the others.

Furthermore, the two differ markedly in their relevance to present-day industrial societies. The concept of profession as a very broad, educated stratum has been applied without much difficulty to all industrial nations (for example, Ben-David, 1977, p. 30). But it refers to a much more general and vague phenomenon than does the institutional concept of profession as a distinctive form of organized occupation. The major theoretical writings on the professions have all addressed themselves to professions in this second sense – as a fairly limited number of occupations which share characteristics of considerably greater specificity than higher education alone, and which are distinctive as separate occupations. Their members conceive of themselves by their occupation first and by their “class,” if at all, only second. It is precisely this institutional concept of profession which is very difficult to apply to the entire range of occupations in the “professional stratum” of any industrial nation, or even to those middle-class occupations in Europe which would, in Anglo-American nations, be considered professions in the more narrow sense.

Occupations called professions in English have had a rather special history. As we all know, the medieval universities of Europe spawned the three original learned professions of medicine, law, and the clergy (of which university teaching was part). Elliott (1972, pp. 14, 32) has suggested the term “status professions” for them, pointing out quite accurately their marked difference from the recent “occupational professions.”

As the occupational structure of capitalist industrialism developed during the nineteenth century in England, and then later in the United States, terminological consensus became greatly confused by the efforts of newly reorganized or newly formed middle-class occupations to seek the title of “profession” because it was connected with the gentlemanly status of the traditional learned professions (Reader, 1967; Larson, 1977). While there were very important differences between the two nations, they had in common a comparatively passive state apparatus with a strong but by no means unambivalent laissez-faire philosophy, and a small civil service.

Occupations seeking a secure and privileged place in the economy of those countries could not do more than seek state support for an exclusionary shelter in the open market where they had to compete with rival occupations. They had to organize their own training and credentialling institutions, since the state played a passive role in such affairs. Unlike in other countries, the title “profession” was used to establish the status of successful occupations; it became part of the official occupational classification scheme in the United States and in England, expanding its coverage slowly by including more occupations in the same category, with the same title, as the original status professions of the medieval universities (see Reader, 1967, pp. 146–66, 207–11). Gaining recognition as a “profession” was important to occupations not only because it was associated with traditional gentry status, but also because its traditional connotations of disinterested dedication and learning legitimated the effort to gain protection from competition in the labor market. Given laissez-faire philosophy, only quite special excuses could justify the state-sanctioned creation of a market shelter. The ideologies of special expertise and moral probity provided by the traditional concept of status profession, sustained by ostensibly supportive occupational institutions, provided just such a basis for legitimating protection from the winds of occupational competition.

In England and the United States, the tendency was for each occupation to have to mount its own movement for recognition and protection. Its members’ loyalties and identities were attached to their individual occupation and its institutions. The situation was rather different in Europe, where the state was much more active in organizing both training and employment. The traditional status professions maintained their occupational distinctions as they reorganized their corporate bodies, but the new, middle-class occupations did not seek classification as “professions” to gain status and justify a market shelter: such an umbrella title imputing special institutional characteristics to them is not employed to distinguish them (see Hughes, 1971, pp. 387–8). Rather, their status and security are gained by their attendance at state-controlled, elite institutions of higher education which assures them of elite positions in the civil service or other technical-managerial positions. In nineteenth-century Russia and Poland, merely to be a graduate of a gymnasium was what was important, not one’s occupation (Gella, 1976). In Germany, what was important was to be a university graduate, an Akademiker (Rueschemeyer, 1973, pp. 63–122; Ringer, 1979, p. 411). In France, one’s fortunes flowed from attending one of the grandes écoles (Ben-David, 1977, pp. 38–46). Primary identity was not given by occupation, but by the status gained by elite education no matter what the particular specialty. As Ben-David noted for France,

the technically competent … whom the [grandes écoles] system was … designed to produce … do not primarily identify themselves by their professional qualifications, but by their employment. If they are in private practice, they tend to consider themselves part of the bourgeois entrepreneur class, and if they are salaried, they consider themselves officials of a certain rank, rather than chemists or engineers. (1977, p. 46)

This is a far cry from Anglo-American professions, which gain their distinction and position in the market-place less from the prestige of the institutions in which they were educated than from their training and identity as particular, corporately organized occupations to which specialized knowledge, ethicality, and importance to society are imputed, and for which privilege is claimed.²

It is thus not without justice that professionalism has been called “the British disease” (Fores and Glover, 1978, p. 15), though I would prefer to call it an “Anglo-American disease.” Nor is it an accident that the theoretical literature on the professions is almost wholly Anglo-American, European reviews and use of the Anglo-American literature notwithstanding (Maurice, 1972, pp. 213–25). All in all, I would argue that, as an institutional concept, the term “profession” is intrinsically bound up with a particular period of history and with only a limited number of nations in that period of history.

THE INEVITABILITY OF APOLOGETICS AND POLEMICS

If we grant the concrete, historically bound character of the term, we can better understand some of the other controversies surrounding definition in the recent literature. Metatheoretical critiques have frequently noted that earlier writings on the professions created definitions which were reflections of what spokesmen for Anglo-American occupations seeking social recognition as professions say about themselves (Freidson, 1988, pp. 77–84; Gyarmati, 1975, pp. 629–54). Roth (1974, p. 17) put this criticism very forcefully: “Sociologists … have become the dupe of established professions (helping them justify their dominant position and its payoff) and arbiters of occupations on the make.” The implication of such criticism is that theorizers should in some sense strive to create a definition which does not reflect the interests of the groups it attempts to delineate, that their definition should be more detached in its perspective. However, because of the very nature of the concept, one cannot avoid its intrinsic connection with the evaluative social processes which create it.

For the professions, the issues for commentary and analysis are determined more or less by the national history of the term itself, and by the usage of that term both by members of particular occupations and by members of other groups in Anglo-American society. Given the historical fact that the term is a socially valued label, with the possibility of social, economic, political, or at the very least symbolic rewards accruing to those so labelled, it seems inevitable both that disagreement about its application to particular persons or occupations will exist, and that disagreement will exist about the propriety of the special rewards accruing to those to whom it is applied. Because of the nature of the concept, any enterprise of defining and analysing it is inevitably subject to the possibility of being employed to direct the assignment and justification of rewards to some, and the withholding of rewards from others.

It follows, therefore, that those whom Roth described as “dupes” sustain the positions both of established professions and those attempting to gain their success by emulating them. It also follows, however, that those, including myself and Roth, who undertake highly critical evaluations of others’ definitions and analyses, also serve as “dupes,” though of different agents – “dupes” both of managerial programs of deskilling and proletarianizing professional work, and of working-class movements aimed at reducing pay differentials and barriers to entry into “professional” jobs. Both sets of writers, while differing in substance, do not differ in intellectual approach to the concept. The watershed of the scholarly literature that I noted as occurring in the 1960s was a watershed in changing social sympathy and substantive interest, but marked no break with the earlier preoccupation of adjudicating the application of the label and its rewards. Perhaps that is why there have not been any coherent advances in theorizing in spite of the marked change in the tone of the literature – because the basis for theorizing has not changed.

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PROFESSION

A “profession” may be described as a folk concept, then the research strategy appropriate to it is phenomenological in character. One does not attempt to determine what profession is in an absolute sense so much as how people in a society determine who is a professional and who is not, how they “make” or “accomplish” professions by their activities, and what the consequences are for the way in which they see themselves and perform their work. This is not, however, a simple undertaking, for we cannot realistically assume that there is a holistic folk which produces only one folk concept of profession in societies as complex as ours. There must be a number of folk and thus a number of folk concepts. Surely it seems likely that rather different concepts of profession would be advanced by occupations seeking the rewards of a professional label than by other occupations attempting to preserve the rewards they have already won, or by sets of employers or clients seeking t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Clarifying the Issues
• Part II Elements of a Theory of Professionalism
• Part III Prophesying the Future of the Professions
• Part IV Choosing Professionalism as Social Policy
• References
• Index