The Rise of Professional Society

England Since 1880

Harold Perkin, Professor Harold Perkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134416813
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The Rise of Professional Society lays out a stimulating and controversial framework for the study of British society, challenging accepted paradigms based on class analysis. Perkins argues that the non-capitalist "professional class" represents a new principle of social organization based on trained expertise and meritocracy, a "forgotten middle class" conveniently overlooked by classical social theorists.

Chapter 1
THE MEANING OF
PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY

After the unanswerable question whether human civilization will survive for much longer or succumb to a catastrophe that may destroy all sentient life on earth, the most important question facing mankind today is: if we escape the holocaust, what sort of society will we survive to live in? What sort of society is it that has brought us to this brink, of unprecedented power both for creation and destruction? All of us now in the more economically advanced countries routinely enjoy material comforts far beyond the luxuries of Cleopatra, Kubla Khan or even Queen Victoria. We travel faster and more freely than Ariel, hear sounds and sweet airs more appealing than Prospero’s, conjure living pictures out of the void at the touch of a button, have instant access to grand opera, ballet, classical and rock music, the Olympic Games and the World Cup, and all the delights that our ancestors could only dream of. And most of us live lives far longer, fuller and freer from pain than our predecessors.

At the same time we live in greater fear, not just of those old enemies famine, plague and war (the Sahel drought, the AIDS epidemic and the Gulf War show that those enemies are still with us), but of total extermination, if not by the instant horror of nuclear holocaust then by the slow attrition of the environment. In pursuit of the Nirvana of material bliss and avoidance of the Inferno of nuclear destruction we also have to choose politically, between a Western version of democracy that allows free play to competitive forces but may end in the survival of anti-democratic concentrations of economic power, and an Eastern version that claims to put human welfare first but from the outset sacrifices freedom to equality.

What has brought us to this pass? Faced with such overwhelming successes and dangers, we may well think with Emerson that ‘Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.’¹ It is clear, however, that men and women working together in social Organizations have produced these dilemmas. We ourselves, wittingly or unwittingly, are the authors of our own prosperity and potential destruction. Whole armies of experts—scientists, technologists, industrial managers, highly skilled workers, medical researchers, artists, writers, teachers, administrators and politicians—have contributed to our promising and perilous situation. The world we have gained and may be about to lose is the consequence of a myriad human activities which have only one thing in common: they are increasingly specialized, increasingly diverse, increasingly skilled—in a word, increasingly professional. The twentieth is not, pace Franklin D.Roosevelt, the century of the common man but of the uncommon and increasingly professional expert.

1 CLASS VERSUS HIERARCHY

We live, in fact, in an increasingly professional society. Modern society in Britain, as elsewhere in the developed world, is made up of career hierarchies of specialized occupations, selected by merit and based on trained expertise. Where pre-industrial society was based on passive property in land and industrial society on actively managed capital, professional society is based on human capital created by education and enhanced by strategies of closure, that is, the exclusion of the unqualified. Landed and industrial wealth still exerts power but is increasingly managed by corporate professionals in property companies and business corporations. The professional hierarchies cut across the horizontal solidarities of class in the warp and weft of the social fabric. Both class and hierarchy are an integral part of the fabric and neither ever quite disappears from view. The ‘great functional interests’ of land, trade and finance, each representing a vertical swathe from landlord through farmer to labourer or merchant through putter-out to craftsman, predominated over the latent class conflict of eighteenth-century society.² The organized antagonisms of the Anti- Corn Law League against the landlords and of the Chartists against both landed politicians and industrial employers brought class to the face of the cloth in Victorian society. In late twentieth-century Britain, despite the survival of class rhetoric and class-based political parties, the warp of professionalism is beginning to show through and overlay the weft of class.

A professional society is more than a society dominated by professionals. The professionals are not just another ruling class, replacing the landlords of pre-industrial society and the capitalists of industrial society as in James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution—though there is the ever-present danger that some of them might try to become so. Professionalism permeates society from top to bottom, in two ways. Firstly, the professional hierarchies—not all of them equal in status or rewards, or stretching as far as the top—reach much further down the social pyramid than ever landlordship or even business capital did, and embrace occupations formerly thought beyond the reach of professional aspiration. As more and more jobs become subject to specialized training and claim expertise beyond the common sense of the layman—and all professionals are laymen to the other professions—their occupants demand the status and rewards of a profession. In these days of increasingly employed professionals— close to the original model of the clergy or the military rather than medicine or the law, though even doctors and lawyers are now mostly salaried employees—this means a secure income, a rising salary scale, fringe benefits such as paid holidays and sick leave, and an occupational pension. Such professional conditions of work are increasingly within reach not merely of non-manual workers but of increasing numbers of the manual working class.

Secondly, a professional society is one permeated by the professional social ideal. A social ideal is a model of how society should be organized to suit a certain class or interest and of the ideal citizen and his contribution to it. Pre-industrial society was permeated by the aristocratic ideal based on property and patronage. Passive property, usually in land, provided the means for the ideal citizen, the leisured gentleman, to offer his unique contribution of political rule, moral leadership and encouragement of art, literature and sport. Patronage enabled him to select the recruits for those positions of power and influence not filled by property alone. Industrial society was permeated by the entrepreneurial ideal based on active capital and competition, on business investment as the engine of the economy run by the active owner-manager, ideally the self-made man who rose to wealth and influence by his own intrinsic worth and won out in open competition. The rival ideal of the working class, never achieved in practice, was the collective ideal of labour and co-operation, of labour as the sole source of wealth and co-operative endeavour as the fairest means of harnessing and rewarding it, and of the worker’s right to the whole produce of labour. The professional ideal, based on trained expertise and selection by merit, differed from the other three in emphasizing human capital rather than passive or active property, highly skilled and differentiated labour rather than the simple labour theory of value, and selection by merit defined as trained and certified expertise. No more or no less than the rest did it live up to reality. Not all landlords were benevolent gentlemen, not all capitalists self-made men, not all wage earners more concerned with rising with their class rather than out of it. And not all professional men were prepared to let merit rise without help from family wealth or privileged education. Professional society is based on merit, but some acquire merit more easily than others.

The ideals compete in a wider field than the economic market for income and wealth. They compete in the societal market for income, power and status. To complicate the metaphor and make the social fabric three-dimensional, we can envisage society—any society—as an equi-valent tetrahedron, a three-sided pyramid, its faces labelled (with acknowledgments to Max Weber) class, power and status.³ The faces are only three ways of looking at the same social reality, from the economic, the political, and the socio-ideological point of view. No face—pace Marx (or, rather, the vulgar Marxists) with the economic interpretation of society, Ralf Dahrendorf with the primacy of political authority in ‘coordinated organizations’ (Herrschaftsverbanden—derived indeed from Weber), or Weber himself with his emphasis on charisma, religious belief and morality—is more fundamental than the other two. They are equi-valent, of equal worth, at least until one of them wins out in the competition. Talk of economic substructure and political or cultural superstructure, as in the Marxist or Annales schools of historiography, is premature until one examines empirically the society in question.

Industrial society was of course based on the ownership of capital, but capital itself was based on the concept of absolute property, which was the product of law and politics. Ultimately it derived from the victory of English landlords over the peasants, the church and the crown which came to be enshrined in 12 Charles II, cap. 24, the Act of 1660 which turned feudal tenures into freeholds.⁴ The capitalists, who took no part in the struggle for absolute property, were the fortuitous beneficiaries of laws enacted for the benefit of landlords. Pre-industrial society was based on landed property but ultimately on feudal conquest and the continuous struggle between landlords and kings from the Conquest to the Civil War, and thus on military force. The wealth of the medieval church, by contrast, derived from its power to persuade kings, barons and commoners to endow it with land and goods in return for spiritual services, above all prayers for their souls. When the doctrine of purgatory was rejected at the Reformation, making prayers for the dead irrelevant, half of its wealth was confiscated.

Thus wealth, power and status could derive from any face of the pyramid. For the social fabric inside the pyramid has a fourth dimension: change over time. It is not static but dynamic. The three forces, economic, political and socio-ideological, are variant forms of energy transmutable (with suitable transformers and inevitable transmission losses) into either or both of the other two. Physical force by feudal conquerors or Mafia-like, home-grown strong men is readily transmutable into wealth (land tenure) and status (lordship). Economic power is less readily transformed into status and authority because purchasing power (claims on labour) requires the pre-condition of symbolic property (currency or credit instruments), both based on pre-existing law, and also the agreement of the existing holders of power and status to honour it, by, for example, the sale of feudal land or aristocratic titles—unless, of course, these can be seized by revolution, in which case capitalism comes to rest as much on force as feudalism.

More easily forgotten is that status, or socio-ideological, cultural, intellectual or spiritual power, has often been transformed into wealth and political authority. A good case could be made (though it is unlikely to hold for all historical societies) for the primacy of the socio-ideological face. The greatest conquerors from Alexander to Napoleon and Hitler have used charisma to gather followers and inspire their armies, and industrialists like Carnegie, Ford and Nuffield have used propaganda and philanthropy to sing the benefits of capitalism. More directly, charismatic power has often been used to take over the wealth and authority of whole societies: consider the careers of Savanarola, Eva Peron or the Ayatollah Khomeini and their use of inspirational oratory to command the obedience, wealth and military force of their societies. Longer-lived political success has accrued to ideological persuasion by priests and bureaucrats: to the Aztec and Inca priest-kings who persuaded their subjects that daily human sacrifice caused the sun to rise and the seasons to return; to the Bishops of Rome whose wealth and power flowed from control of the keys of heaven; and to the Chinese imperial bureaucracy whose monopoly of administrative skill seduced wave after wave of less civilized conquerors. Socio-ideological persuasion is an enviable form of power (while it lasts, and its weakness is that it can fade as fast as the belief in it) since its devotees give freely and enthusiastically what they yield only grudgingly to military force or superior purchasing power. Political and economic elites pay it the compliment of emulation in propaganda and education.

The professions in general may not aspire to such heights of charismatic persuasion but their modus vivendi starts from the same face of the pyramid. They live by persuasion and propaganda, by claiming that their particular service is indispensable to the client or employer and to society and the state. By this means they hope to raise their status and through it their income, authority and psychic rewards (deference and self-respect). With luck and persistence they may turn the human capital they acquire into material wealth. In the pre-industrial past individual professionals—royal favourites (in the oldest profession) like George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham or Nell Gwyn, archbishops like Wolsey and Sumner, judges like Lords Eldon and Scott, generals like Marlborough and Wellington, and even lowly solicitors with other incomes like Sir John Hawkins or Sir Walter Scott—were able to buy land and try to found a family. In industrial society even actors and playwrights like Sheridan, Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw turned human capital into visible wealth. But only in post-industrial society have the professions as a whole been able to establish human capital as the dominant form of wealth. Whereas a hundred years ago, according to Peter Lindert, human capital accounted for only about 15 per cent of national income, it now accounts for about 52 per cent.⁵

Property is not, as is commonly believed, an object or a credit instrument, which are just its outward signs. Leaving aside its lesser meaning as the right to immediate use of tangible objects like a car, a house or an owner-occupied farm (each of which, indeed, yields an imputed rent), property in its major meaning of power over resources, which creates relations between members of a society, is a right to a flow of income: rent, interest, profits, labour service, or goods in kind. It is an acknowledged and legitimated claim to other people’s labour.

How could the professions transform a service into income-yielding property? Gary Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, Alvin Gouldner, Anthony Giddens and others have familiarized the concepts of human, educational, cultural and intellectual capital, by which investment in acquired knowledge and expertise yields a rate of return commensurate with that of material capital.⁶ Such theories tend to assume that investment in specialized training of itself yields a differential return without any control of the market (other than the fortuitous economic or demographic fluctuations in supply and demand for specialized labour). Unfortunately for that analysis, specialized training of itself yields only earned income, payment for immediate services rendered, which may even fall below the cost of production if the service is oversupplied or undervalued. It cannot, except accidentally, create property in the form of vested income without some device to transform it into a scarce resource.

The transforming device is professional control of the market. When a professional occupation has, by active persuasion of the public and the state, acquired sufficient control of the market in a particular service, it creates an artificial scarcity in the supply which has the effect of yielding a rent, in the strict Ricardian sense of a payment for the use of a scarce resource. Some part of the payment, of course, will always accrue to the immediate work performed, but its value will be enhanced by an amount proportional to the scarcity of the service or skill. A natural or ‘accidental’ example, the fortuitous result of a unique though professionally trained voice, is that of Placido Domingo, who is paid a very large fee for each performance, most of which is rent for the use of the scarce resource, or a Henry Moore sculpture, which is a lump of stone transformed in value by his signature. Monopoly is not a sine qua non: scarcity may appear long before outright monopoly—the landlords charged rent long before achieving a monopoly, if they ever did—and the element of rent will be larger or smaller accordingly. But some element of rent accrues from any degree of control of the market, which is why organized professions are paid more than equivalent unorganized occupations. Since the essence of property is the right to (some portion of) the flow of income from the resource owned, this professional capital, which is manifestly more tangible than stocks or shares, less destructible than many forms of material property (buildings burn more readily than people), and capable of self-renewal by means of improvement in skills and expertise, is thus in the truest sense a species of property—albeit contingent property, contingent upon the performance of the service.

The importance of such property to the professional is that it gives him what all income-yielding property provides for its possessors: independence, security, the right to criticize without fear of the consequences, and so a secure position from which to defend one’s place in society or, if he so wishes, a position of leverage from which to change society or one’s own corner of it. Above all, it gives him the psychic security and self-confidence to press his own social ideal, his own vision of society and how it should be organized, upon the other classes. And the gradual triumph of the professional ideal over the last hundred years, as we shall see in this book, paved the way for the hegemony of human capital and the emergence of professional society.

There was a crucial difference, however, between the hegemony of the professional ideal and that of the aristocratic or entrepreneurial ideals in earlier societies. Whereas their ideal citizen had been a limited concept, applicable to only one group in society, however many amongst the rest aspired to it—only the landed few could be leisured gentlemen, only those who acquired capital entrepreneurs—the professional ideal could in principle be extended to everyone. Every landlord and industrialist could be transformed into a professional manager, every worker into a salaried employee. Moreover, since the professional’s status and income depend less on the market than on his power to persuade society to set an agreed value on his service, the ideal implied the principle of a just reward not only for the particular profession but for every occupation necessary to society’s well-being.

Since, too, the ideal is justified by social efficiency and the avoidance of waste, particularly the waste of human talent, it implied a principle of social justice which extended to the whole population the right to security of income, educational opportunity, decent housing in a clean envi...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• INTRODUCTION TO THE 2002 EDITION
• PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
• CHAPTER 1: THE MEANING OF PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY
• CHAPTER 2: THE ZENITH OF CLASS SOCIETY
• CHAPTER 3: A SEGREGATED SOCIETY
• CHAPTER 4: CLASS SOCIETY AND THE PROFESSIONAL IDEAL
• CHAPTER 5: THE CRISIS OF CLASS SOCIETY
• CHAPTER 6: A HALFWAY HOUSE: SOCIETY IN WAR AND PEACE
• CHAPTER 7: TOWARDS A CORPORATE SOCIETY
• CHAPTER 8: THE TRIUMPH OF THE PROFESSIONAL IDEAL
• CHAPTER 9: THE PLATEAU OF PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY
• CHAPTER 10: THE BACKLASH AGAINST PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY
• NOTES