The Rise of Professionalism

Monopolies of Competence and Sheltered Markets

Vilfredo Pareto, Magali Sarfatti Larson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138538290
• eBook ISBN: 9781351474993
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What gave rise to our modern conceptions of professional status, and how did particular professions gain their privileged status? Magali Sarfatti Larson shows how our present conception and acceptance of profession was shaped in the liberal phase of capitalism.

Larson argues that professionalization was both a response to the extension of market relations and a movement for the conquest of collective social status by sectors of the bourgeoisie. By comparing the development of various professions in England and the United States during the first part of the nineteenth century, the author gives concrete historical illustration to the multiple relations professions form within their society.

Larson examines the new conditions of professionalization in the phase of corporate capitalism, drawing on a number of historical and sociological sources. While professions began as a mode of autonomous work organization, many credentialed occupations aspire to professionalize in order to shelter the labor markets in which they work. Larson argues that the idea of profession can function as a form of ideological control and concludes that today professionalism works against many of the values that had been historically vested in it. This classic book, complete with a new introduction that brings the work into the twenty-first century, is timely and should be read by all interested in the history and development of organizational life.

PART I

THE ORGANIZATION OF PROFESSIONAL MARKETS

Chapter 1

THE HISTORICAL MATRIX OF MODERN PROFESSIONS

PRE-INDUSTRIAL ANTECEDENTS

Before the industrial revolution, the profile of the free practitioner was defined for lawyers and physicians, and, to a lesser degree, for architects as well.¹ But even the profession of law—which was the first to disengage itself, in the fourteenth century, from the tutelage of the Church—had not yet developed the stable and intimate connection with training and examinations that came to be associated with the professional model during the nineteenth century. This dependence on “objectively” legitimized competence is characteristic of the modern professions; it dates from the “great transformation” which became visible in England toward the end of the eighteenth century. The ethical concept of work which professions inherited from the Reformation is not much older. Professions are, therefore, relatively recent social products. However, a few elements from their pre-industrial past are important to recall, for they suggest why the post-revolutionary societies became a fertile ground for the professions’ development and multiplication.

Specialization of function and the creation of special bodies of practical or theoretical knowledge are a function of the accumulation of resources. In preliterate societies, according to Wilbert Moore, the specialized services that are performed outside of kinship structures are those clearly connected with the “salience of the knowledge or skills for individual or collective welfare.”² But, even before the appearance of writing, “salience” cannot be understood outside of the limits which the preservation of a given social order imposes on the possible definitions of “individual and collective welfare.” Therefore, as soon as we consider class societies, the development of specialized roles and functions is broadly determined by the structure of inequality from which it is inseparable: dependent upon the unequal distribution of wealth, power, and knowledge, the institutionalization of specialized functions itself contributes to the unequal distribution of competence and rewards.

The emergence of the state differentiates the advisers of the rulers from the mass of the ruled. Writing, which allows the accumulation and transmission of knowledge on an unprecedented scale, is monopolized by a caste of scribes with special power. In general, all the special bodies of knowledge that appear in a class society can be monopolized by their creators-possessors. Moreover, the fruits of their application are also a monopoly: in effect, the services that rest on cognitive specialization are almost exclusively reserved to the small literate elites on whom the specialists depend for their existence.³ Their association with elite groups is obvious for the law profession, and also for architecture in the great empires: although architects in Rome were often drawn from the class of slaves, architecture, whether private or official, was considered by Cicero and Vitruvius as “one of the learned professions for which men of good birth and good education are best suited.”⁴ As for medicine, given the universal need for healing and the ineffectiveness of most therapies, it was more sharply stratified and divided by the social position of the practitioners’ clienteles than by the origins of the techniques that were applied.⁵

The distinction between “specialists for the elite” and “practitioners” for more popular clienteles became far clearer with the rise of institutionalized centers of learning, that is, with the rise of the universities in medieval Europe. With some exceptions, the medieval origins of the older professions show a bifurcation between university and guild. The universities had started as associations of students and teachers, or “guilds of learning,” but they soon came under the dominating influence of the Church. Secularization gradually emancipated law and medicine from this tutelage. But the association with the university and, especially, the knowledge of Latin, distinguished the “learned” professions from the craft guilds that developed in the towns between the eleventh and the thirteenth century. The links with the Church, presumably, increased the aura of mystery surrounding the professions’ esoteric knowledge, while Latin clearly associated them with the world of the elites. Their specialized counterparts in the guilds—scriveners, common lawyers, apothecaries, barber-surgeons, master-masons, millwrights—had relatively more democratic origins and clienteles. Some of these specialists appear, much later, in noble or rich households in a master-servant relationship with their aristocratic patrons.⁶ As a rule, however, the common practitioners of the craft guilds appeared together with the urban markets of medieval Europe as free artisans and tradesmen. Their orientation was primarily commercial—that is, geared to a market of services. In England, these pre-professional specialists survived the decline of the craft guilds and, as the “lower branches” of medicine and the law, played a dynamic part in the nineteenth-century constitution of the modern professions.⁷

Two aspects of the professions’ pre-industrial past deserve to be emphasized, for they illustrate well the continuity of form and discontinuities of substance between traditional and modern professions. First, from their pre-industrial days, the professions were closely bound to the stratification system. For the learned professions, establishment and social standing were equivalent to their association with the elites and with the state.⁸ But until almost the nineteenth century, we cannot speak of an internal stratification of the professions, for “common” and “learned” practitioners inhabited different social worlds. Even though they practiced in related fields, the rigidity of the stratification system prevented the constitution of unified areas within the social division of labor. Thus, there were limitations to what their association with the dominant class could ensure for the learned professions: ensconced in the world of elites, they did not compete with their plebeian rivals and could have only weak claims against them. As Eliot Freidson remarks for medicine, passage through a university or membership in a guild gave physicians the means to distinguish themselves from other kinds of healers. These institutional links, however, did not establish their superiority in the eyes of a broad public; by themselves, these marks of distinction were not sufficient to monopolize the healing function. The favor of an elite did not necessarily bring with it wide public support.⁹ To equip themselves for the conquest of public confidence was one of the main tasks of the professions during the “great transformation.” Both logic and historical evidence indicate that the heirs of the pre-industrial professional elites were not the main actors in this effort: secure in their privileges, they had no urgent reason to become the vanguard of the modern process of professionalization.¹⁰

A second point, intimately related to the first, concerns the medieval association of the learned professions with the Church and the university: from this association, the established professional elites derived a clear notion that what distinguished them from traders and artisans was, chiefly, a “liberal education”—that is to say, an education fit for a gentleman, based more on classical culture than on practical skills. The latter had always been acquired through varied forms of apprenticeship, traditionally viewed as an extension of the education conducted within the family.¹¹ The social position and contacts of the family from which a youth set forth to be apprenticed to a father-like master defined the kind of master, and therefore the kind of training, he got. General culture was a further statement about rank, a way of acceding to the cultural province of an elite.

This conception of liberal education also affected the democratic United States, through its British heritage, and especially through the clergy’s enormous influence on higher education: since education bore a clearly religious stamp, the study of the classics seemed useful and practical for the perpetuation of what was the moral and intellectual core of colonial community life.¹² Higher education was essentially classic, aimed at the formation of clergymen and gentlemen who would later acquire a trade, despite the efforts of men such as Franklin and Jefferson to give education a more practical and more secular imprint.

Thus, although formal education appears early in the professional constellation, its import changes radically with the assertion of a modern form of professionalism. The established professional elites could indeed secure their social position through their gentlemanly education, which symbolized their claims on social status; to claim superior competence was based on a different use of education and certification. The rise of a system of formal education which includes basic pre-professional instruction and practical training was crucial: it reorganized and superseded apprenticeship, thus signaling the triumph of a new conception of professionalism over the old one. From dependence upon the power and prestige of elite patrons or upon the judgment of a tightly knit community, the modern professions came to depend upon specific formal training and anonymous certificates.¹³

THE RISE OF MODERN PROFESSIONALISM

In the Anglo-Saxon world at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the recognized gentlemanly professions were, in practice, only three: divinity, and its recent offshoot university teaching; the law, which filled, with the exception of architecture, most of the relatively prestigious specializations that could be considered “professional” before the industrial revolution; and the profession of medicine.¹⁴ In England, the three traditional professions were hierarchically divided into higher and lower branches. The hegemonic social position of the landed gentry reserved the careers in government and the military to those with family connections. In the professions, connections with eminent practitioners were more useful than connections with the Court, the Parliament, and the ecclesiastic hierarchy; but they similarly restricted the mobility of the middle orders and reinforced the predominance of patronage.¹⁵

The French Revolution had sharply signified, for France and for the world, that careers were to be open to talent. But even in France, except for the military in wartime and the government, the opening was more ideological than real until 1830 and the industrial take-off.¹⁶ Both the rise of the modern professions and the reform of the civil service (which in Britain became a fact only after the Medical Act of 1858 and the 1855 report of the Civil Service Commission) were crucially linked to the use of the competitive examination system. This move by merit against birth and patronage was closely connected to the political fortunes of the middle classes and, in England, to the electoral reform of 1832. The democratization should not be overestimated; however, the constitution of modern professions and the emergence of a pattern of professional career represented for the middle classes a novel possibility of gaining status through work.¹⁷

The modern model of profession undoubtedly incorporates pre-industrial criteria of status and pre-industrial ideological orientations. Any concrete historical process, such as the first phase of modern professionalization, inextricably binds together elements which, analytically, pertain to different and even antithetic structural complexes. The collective project of professionalization, furthermore, has its roots in a time of radical and rapid change: the men involved in this project were the “carriers of social structure” and they carried the imprint of changing historical circumstances. Their product, however, was an innovation—if nothing else, because it reorganized and transferred into a new social world parts and patterns of the old.

The general circumstances which imprinted the first phase of professionalization were roughly the same for all the professions. Like most other forms of social organization, professions emerged together in a spurt which Carr-Saunders calls “a wave of association.” This can be shown by considering the dates at which national professional associations were founded—not because the professional association is an equivalent of profession, but because it indicates the maturity of the professional project. In England and in the United States, to which I am limiting my analysis, the principal professional associations were formed in the span of two generations. In England, of the thirteen contemporary professions listed by Harold Wilensky as “established” or “in process,” ten acquired an association of national scope between 1825 to 1880—a fifty-five year span. In the United States, eleven of the same thirteen were similarly organized into national associations in forty-seven years, from 1840 to 1887 (see Appendix Table 1).

The professions that were formed in America were clearly inspired by their European models—especially the British, in the beginning—but, obviously, there were structural differences between the New World and the old which account for many differences in the professional process and in the emergent pattern. Nevertheless, both in England and in the United States, modern professionalization is connected with the same general historical circumstances: it coincides, that is, with the rise of industrial capitalism, with its early crises and consolidation and, toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, with the evolution of capitalism toward its corporate form.

In a seminal essay on organizations and social structure, Arthur Stinchcombe elaborates the proposition that a given society determines the “social technology” available for the invention of new organizational forms. Organizations with these new forms tend to appear, therefore, at the time when it is precisely possible to found them and when they can function effectively with their new structure. Effectiveness reinforces the tendency to institutionalize an organizational form; hence, organizational structures which were invented “at the right time” tend to become relatively stable. For Stinchcombe, the “social technology” available includes preeminently the “economic and technical conditions,” which determine what resources will be available to the creators of new organizations. To these factors I would add ideological conditions, which, among other things, limit the alternatives available or imaginable and are a most important determinant of the motivation to organize. Ideological conditions are particularly relevant in the case of those organizations which, like the professions, aim at “increasing the amount of trustworthiness among strangers” in order to market expert advice.¹⁸

The type of resources mobilized by the professional project* had a determining impact on the resulting organizational and ideological structure. These resources were heterogeneous, for the available “social technology” mixed elements pertaining to the social division of labor with elements pertaining to status stratification in a time of rapid and fundamental social change.

Stinchcombe’s analysis relates organizational capacity at a given time with certain basic societal variables which have a positive effect on both the “motivation to found organizations” and the “chances of success of new organizational forms.” As a consequence, the rate at which new organizational forms appear tends to increase. These basic societal variables are “literacy, urbanization, money economy, political revolution, and previously existing organizational density.”¹⁹ That most of these general conditions greatly improved in England after 1830, and in America some decades later, hardly needs to be belabored.

It is true that education in England was hardly something to boast about, despite the swvival of the parish schools and the liveliness of the Scottish universities. Eric Hobsbawm calls English higher education before 1848 a “joke in poor taste” and adds that “special fears discouraged the education of the poor.”²⁰ But literacy, at least, must have been common in the coarse business circles painted by Dickens. The conditions of the working poor were tragic, both before and after the repeal of the Poor Act; however, the political and cultural vitality of the working class, so admirably documented by E. P. Thompson, indirectly attests to the spread of literacy.²¹ The Charter of 1839 was signed by 2,283,000 persons, and that of 1842 by 3,317,702.²² The self-serving efforts of the middle classes to discipline the poor also afford indirect evidence of the spread of literacy: in 1787, “Robert Raikes estimated that a quarter of a million children were attending Sunday schools …. By 1833, the number … had increased to a million and a half.”²³ In 1851, the year in which the urban population fir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• PART I. THE ORGANIZATION OF PROFESSIONAL MARKETS
• PART II. THE COLLECTIVE CONQUEST OF STATUS
• Appendix Tables
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index