Professionalism

The Third Logic

Eliot Freidson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745666297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Diskriminierung & Rassenbeziehungen

Eliot Freidson has written the first systematic account of professionalism as a method of organizing work. In ideal-typical professionalism, specialized workers control their own work, while in the free market consumers are in command, and in bureaucracy managers dominate. Freidson shows how each method has its own logic requiring different kinds of knowledge, organization, career, education and ideology. He also discusses how historic and national variations in state policy, professional organization, and forms of practice influence the strength of professionalism.

In appraising the embattled position of professions today, Freidson concludes that ideologically inspired attacks pose less danger to professionals' institutional privileges than to their ethical independence to resist use of their specialized knowledge to maximize profit and efficiency without also providing its benefits to all in need.

This timely and original analysis will be of great interest to those in sociology, political science, history, business studies and the various professions.

Part I

Professionalism:
The Ideal Type

1

Professional Knowledge
and Skill

In the most elementary sense, professionalism is a set of institutions which permit the members of an occupation to make a living while controlling their own work.¹ That is a position of considerable privilege. It cannot exist unless it is believed that the particular tasks they perform are so different from those of most workers that self-control is essential. There are other important ways of evaluating work which I shall discuss in later chapters, but here I want to establish the essential framework of distinctions that defines the type of knowledge and skill at the core of professionalism. The two most general ideas underlying professionalism are the belief that certain work is so specialized as to be inaccessible to those lacking the required training and experience, and the belief that it cannot be standardized, rationalized or, as Abbott (1991b: 22) puts it, “commodified.” These distinctions are at the foundation of the social processes which establish the social and economic status of professional work, and while they are elementary, they are too important to take for granted. Here and in the next chapter I will analyze the technical and social assumptions employed in distinguishing different kinds of work with the aim of defining the particular kind of knowledge which is granted the social and economic privileges required for the institutions of professionalism.²

The Growth of Specializations

Specialization – the use of a circumscribed body of knowledge and skills thought to gain particular productive ends – is inherent in work, for it is rare that individuals are either able or willing to perform all of the tasks required for producing the food, shelter, and clothing they need for survival, let alone the amenities of life. After all, even Robinson Crusoe finally had his Friday. And since people do different kinds of work, it follows that they will be evaluated in some way or another. The degree and kind of specialization required by particular jobs, quite apart from their function, is widely used to establish their social, symbolic, and economic value and justify the degree of privilege and trust to which they are entitled.

Some degree of specialization in the work that people do is probably generic to social life. Most writers today believe that gender has been a universal basis for organizing specialization in human societies, even the most ancient, and that there has always been some specialization based on age as well, with children performing some kinds of tasks, adults others, and the aged still others. These rudimentary (but fluid) axes of age and gender upon which specialization has probably always and everywhere been based, order the various work roles that individuals adopt during the course of their daily lives in households and communities. But in daily life people perform a number of different tasks, each having different productive aims and requiring different skills. That is very different from my concern here, which is occupational specialization: people performing only the bundle of tasks connected with a defined productive end in an occupation.

When this narrower range of specialization becomes the source of a living, its practitioners are dependent on more than family or immediate community to provide them with the resources by which they can live. Should they specialize only in producing food, they need to enter into exchange relations with people who can provide them with everything else they need. They may specialize more narrowly – producing only one kind of food, for example, or, like the miller of grains, only processing food, or even, like the shaman, witch doctor, or priest, performing activities having no direct connection with material subsistence. Each additional degree of specialization increases the complexity of the exchange relationships needed to gain the resources for a living.

Full-time specialized work is generally thought to have become common first in the large, dense settlements of the early high civilizations of the Middle East, the Indus Valley, the Far East, and Central and South America (Childe 1965). There, those who performed particular tasks developed distinct and stable social identities as “trades,” many of which are still familiar to us today. In general, the convention is to characterize such trades as being specialized in producing a single product or service as a whole, from the beginning to the point where it is ready to be consumed. So one can speak of shoemakers, potters, bakers, and the like. But by the end of the eighteenth century in England, most particularly during the nineteenth century in England, western Europe, and North America, and elsewhere not until the twentieth century, the Industrial Revolution created a new kind of specialization. Adam Smith was its best-known early celebrant.

Manual Specializations

In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Smith’s very first chapter began with praise for the way specialization increased productivity. He was not referring to the traditional trades, though they are certainly specialized. He wrote about a much less traditional form with which his vocabulary could not deal adequately. As the nouns “specialist” and “specialization” were not available in English before the middle of the nineteenth century nor in French before 1830 (OED 1971: 2948; Robert 1978: 1851) Smith used the phrase “division of labor” instead, and characterized the specialized enterprises of the workers he discussed as “trades,” even though they were not defined as occupations. This new kind of specialization was exemplified by Smith’s discussion of pinmaking, where the conventional, recognizable trade of pinmaker was replaced by a number of smaller and narrower, highly repetitive jobs created by assembling a number of workers under one roof and having each specialize in one of the separate tasks that together are employed to make a pin. Some workers devoted themselves to drawing out the wire, others to straightening it, still others to cutting it, or pointing it, or grinding it at the top for receiving the head. Some made the heads, others fastened the heads to the pins, others whitened the pins, and still others put the completed pins into a paper.

By means of this kind of specialization, the occupation of pinmaker is broken down into separate, limited tasks, each part of a coordinated plan designed to result in the production of pins. Thus, the pinmaker is no longer an individual practicing a trade; the organization and its production plan become the pinmaker, and each of the tasks created by the plan becomes so narrow in scope and simple and repetitive in execution that outside the organization it is unrecognized as a trade or an occupation. It is seen only as a job or as work within the pinmaking establishment. Neither in general official statistics nor in everyday life do those jobs gain social identities based on the particular specializations of wire-straightening, pin-head making, pin whitening, and the like, though in detailed labor statistics they might be so distinguished. Outside the firm, both officially and in everyday life, the primary social identity of those who perform such jobs lies in being an unskilled or semi-skilled industrial worker, or in being an employee of a particular firm, identified by working at the firm rather than by the specific job in that firm. The work is not defined or organized as an occupation.

This form of specialization was not entirely new for the Industrial Revolution. In the fourth century BC, Xenophon described a range of specializations at the end of which there was something “less than a whole trade” that resembled what Smith described:

In small towns the same workman makes chairs and doors and prows and tables, and often the same artisan builds houses … In large cities, on the other hand, inasmuch as many people have demands to make upon each branch of industry, one trade alone, and often even less than a whole trade, is enough to support a man: one man, for instance, makes shoes for men, and another for women; and there are places even where one man earns a living only by stitching shoes, another by cutting them out, another by sewing the uppers together, while there is another who performs none of these operations but only assembles the parts. (Kranzberg and Gies 1975: 40, italics added)

If the fragmentation of pinmaking into something less than a “whole trade” during the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries was not absolutely new to history, it was certainly new for it to be the form of work common to a large proportion of the labor force. It became so common that it was used to characterize an entire class of workers – the industrial proletariat.

Intellectual Specializations

But it would be a great mistake to use either pinmaking or Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, for that matter, to typify all of the specialization that developed during the Industrial Revolution, for at the same time that manual specialization developed in factories, another very different kind grew up in other institutions. From the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day there has been a continuous increase of specialization in the pursuit and application of complex, formal knowledge and technique. Scholarship and scientific research, once the pastimes of such serious amateurs³ as Charles Darwin, developed into full-time, paid occupations during the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries. The few intellectual occupations trained in the medieval universities, the original “status professions” (Elliott 1972) of law, medicine, the ministry, and university teaching, expanded in size and were either transformed or split up into separate disciplines, many of which developed subdisciplines that split off again to become established as distinct, organized disciplines in their own right.

The practice of most was sustained by the host occupation of university teaching, but those who could practice in the marketplace became self-supporting occupations, whether self-employed, like some physicians and lawyers in some times and places, employed by the state, like jurists and some engineers, or by industrial enterprises, as was early the case for chemists and most engineers. The development of that form of specialization, which involved the middle rather than the working class, led to the coming of the “expert” and the “technician,” along with the English words (which did not exist earlier) to designate them conveniently (Freidson 1986: 12–13; Barley and Orr (1997b: 12–14). The new “occupational professions” emerged, some evolving from the old “status professions,” some from the informal economy, as uroscopers evolved into urologists, bone-setters into orthopedists, and domestic workers into trained nurses (see Dingwall 1983). Some, closer to the present day, grew up with new technology to serve the needs of established professions (see Elliott 1972; Reader 1966; Larson 1977; and, for technicians, Barley and Orr 1997b).

Types of Specialization

Mention of pinmakers and scientists as new specializations makes it clear that there is a whole range of specializations and that the differences among them are too important to ignore. Here, I shall present them as simple polar opposites although, as Littler’s analysis makes clear (Littler 1982: 6–11), to do the issue justice we must ultimately include additional criteria.⁴ Those who celebrate the virtues of a work-life of specialization (as did, for example, Durkheim) do not celebrate the work of the pinmakers. As we shall see in chapter 6, their kind of specialization might have been praised for its productivity, but was deplored for its effect on those who perform it. It is specialists and specializations of a different order that are lauded – the crafts practiced by skilled workers (sometimes tellingly described as the aristocracy of labor),⁵ on the one hand, and on the other, in Smith’s words, “the employments … [of] people of some rank or fortune [which] … are not … simple and uniform … [but rather] extremely complicated and as such exercise the head more than the hands” (1976b: 305).

Two major types of specialization seem evident, representing quite different qualities of work, with quite different consequences for those who perform them and those who consume their products. On the one hand there is the type of specialization represented by those who perform different parts of the process of Smith’s pinmaking – the type of specialization that Marx and subsequent Marxist writers called the “detailed division of labor.” This unwieldy and literally uninformative phrase is employed largely to characterize the work performed by semi-skilled workers in factories organized under the historic circumstances of capitalist production (though state socialist nations also organized factory production in the same way). The phrase is intended to convey the idea of the exclusive performance of tasks that are so simple and repetitive that they can be performed by virtually any normal adult – indeed, as was the case in the nineteenth century, even by children. In this form of specialization, usually called “semi-skilled labor” in English, there is said to be little or no opportunity to vary the tasks to be performed or the way they can be performed. Because the conventional Marxist adjectives “minute” and “detailed” do not capture the essential character of this form of specialization, I propose to employ the term “mechanical” instead, and speak of mechanical specialization. In Fox’s analysis (1974: 16), whether or not these are tasks with a narrow, minute, or detailed range, their performance is specifically organized to minimize individual discretion.

In contrast to this mechanical specialization is what might be called discretionary specialization (see Friedmann 1964: 85–8). What distinguishes it from the other lies in the fact that the tasks it involves, however narrow, minute, detailed, or “specialized” the range, are tasks in which discretion or fresh judgment must often be exercised if they are to be performed successfully. Whatever the case may be in reality (and that may be a matter of opinion), the tasks and their outcome are believed to be so indeterminate (see Jamous and Peloille 1970; Boreham 1983) as to require attention to the variation to be found in individual cases. And while those whose occupation it is to perform such tasks will almost certainly engage in some routines that can be quite mechanical,⁶ it is believed that they must be prepared to be sensitive to the necessity of altering routine for individual circumstances that require discretionary judgment and action. Such work has the potential for innovation and creativity, thus distinguishing it from that of Adam Smith’s pinmakers.

It may appear that I am merely echoing the conventional distinction between mental and manual labor which has a long history in Western philosophy (see, for example, Applebaum 1992; Tilgher 1958) and which was implied in Adam Smith’s mention of the specialized “employments” of the higher classes cited earlier. Moreover, it is one still used by Marxists today. But used uncritically it conflates important symbolic, class, cognitive, and analytic distinctions. Certainly the implication that manual or physical labor does not involve the use of the mind is false, for little if any human work can be separated from symbolization and thought. What underlies it is not the use of the mind instead of the body but rather the kind of knowledge and thought that is believed to be used in different kinds of work. Mechanical specialization by definition requires primarily the knowledge and concepts that normal adults learn during the course of their everyday lives. Discretionary specialization, on the other hand, is thought to require the employment of a body of knowledge that is gained by special training – which is why its practitioners are called experts or specialists and pinmakers are not. What is needed to clarify the mental/manual distinction and refine our conception of work and specialization is an adequate conception of the different kinds of knowledge and skill that are used to guide the performance of work.

Skill and the Tacit

I have deliberately used the word “skill” in the same breath as “knowledge” because while I believe it necessary to distinguish the two, they are both essential to work and complement each other in its performance. Like all keywords, however, the word “skill” is ambiguous (see the discussion in Becker 1998: 112–16). In official statistics it is used to represent the amount and kind of specialized training that distinguishes members of the labor force. In the Marxist debate on proletarianization, where the “de-skilling” of labor⁷ is a central issue, it is used in a quite different fashion. However, in his review of the various ways the term has been used, Attewell (1990: 423) concludes that “at the core of all definitions is the idea of competence or proficiency – the ability to do something well. The word encompasses both mental and physical proficiency (i.e., skill implies understanding or knowledge), but it also connotes physical dexterity.” Similarly, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as the “capability of accomplishing something with precision and certainty” (OED 1971: 2847). Skill may thus be taken to refer to the capacity to accomplish a task, which may be kept analytically separate from the substantive knowledge connected with the task itself. While skill is itself a kind of knowledge, namely, of the techniques for using or applying substantive knowledge, it is facilitative...