Professions and Power (Routledge Revivals)

Terence J. Johnson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315471358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sullo sviluppo globale

First published in 1972, this book rejects as inadequate the 'trait' and 'functionalist' theories of the professions and instead presents an alternative framework to analyse the contemporaneous occupational change in industrial societies. The author describes how occupational specialisation creates varying degrees of social distance between producers and consumers of goods or services, thus several institutions of control social have developed — collegiate, corporate or oligarchic patronage, mediative. The author looks at the social conditions necessary for the development of these methods of control and the apparent decline of professionalism in both developed and undeveloped societies.

1.
Theoretical Approaches: Concepts and Contrasts

The increase in the number of professionals and the growth of professionalism has been generally accepted by social scientists as a major if not a defining characteristic of industrial societies. So much so that a recent president of the American Sociological Association felt able to assert as his first official utterance that ‘An industrialising society is a. professionalising society’.¹ Surprisingly, this general acceptance of the significance of professional occupations has not been fully reflected in theoretical analyses of the place of the professions in industrial and developing societies. While social commentators have been ever ready to identify the ‘true’ inheritors of power from among the ranks of the professionals – the ‘technocrat’, ‘expert’, ‘organisation man’, ‘manager’, have each in turn been seen as at least populating the corridors of power² – sociologists have, on the whole, tended to retreat in the face of these larger questions, digging in behind the defences of more circumspect analyses of a micro-sociological or social-psychological kind.³ While the rapid growth of established professions and the emergence of new self-styled professional occupations have wrought significant changes in the class structures of industrialised societies, sociologists have focused attention on questions of attitude formation and socialisation into professional occupations.⁴ While we have witnessed the rise of the professional bureaucracies such as the ‘law factory’ and the internationally-based accountancy firm, sociologists have turned to narrowly conceived problems exemplified by the numerous studies of ‘role strain’ in professional practice, examining the detailed consequences of conflicting expectations upon the practice of such occupations as social work, nursing, pharmacy, etc.¹ As a result the problems and themes which informed the origins of the sociology of the professions are either ignored in recent work or remain implicit.

The sociology of the professions received much of its initial impetus from two fundamental questions. The first concerned the extent to which professional occupations could be regarded as a unique product of the division of labour in society. The second question posed the problem: do the professions perform a special role in industrial society, economic, political or social? The first question stimulated Marx to attempt to establish the secondary and derivative character of professional classes, particularly in terms of their negative contribution to surplus value.² While for Marx the professions raised fundamental issues about the relationship between social differentiation and class structure, more recent sociologists have to a large extent concentrated on general aspects of social mobility and forms of stratification to the exclusion of an analysis of the division of labour itself. As a result the interest in the professions as a ‘special’ product of social differentiation has also been lost. Rather, the problem has been transformed into a largely sterile attempt to define what the special ‘attributes’ of a profession are. These definitional exercises litter the field. Or again, the question of the uniqueness of professional occupations is safely buried as a basic assumption which justifies the very existence of the specialist field we call the ‘sociology of the professions’. Attempts to treat the professions as unique are based on the assumption that there is some essential quality or qualities which mark off the professions from other occupations and provide a basis for a distinct body of theory and variant forms of analysis.

The second question which focused on the special role or functions of the professions in industrial societies has been largely operationalised out of existence. As sociologists set about analysing the part which the professions play in the various spheres of social life – in the economy or political system, as innovators or experts – they have tended to narrow down the original problem in order to handle it or as a reflex to demands for answers to specific social problems. They have split up the large question into smaller and more manageable components, dealing with such fashionable questions of the time as: what are the consequences of the growth of bureaucratic scientific organisations for the ‘creative’ role of the professional scientist;¹ or, more pragmatically, can we expect the scientist-bureaucrat to deliver the goods? Or again, under what peculiar institutional conditions do professionals – and this is related mainly to the medical profession – develop their characteristic sets of attitudes?² For example, can doctors maintain a highly personalised professional-client relationship in an increasingly impersonalised context? Each of these examples includes many cases where social-psychological questions concerning the generation and change of professional attitudes have superseded the more general sociological problems. Interestingly, one area in which the fundamental question of the overall social role of the professional remains significant is in the case of the military, but even here the problem is focused not on the professional soldier in industrialised societies, but on the political role of the military in developing societies.³ In general, the end-product of these trends in the sociology of the professions has been a widening gap between research and the theoretical problems suggested by the phenomenal growth of the professions and the implications of this growth for the changing distribution of power in industrial societies.

The neglect of these large-scale problems by sociologists has been associated with their nervous withdrawal from a ‘value-laden’ controversy in which on the one hand the professions were seen as a positive force in social development, standing against the excesses of both laissez-faire individualism and state collectivism, and on the other as harmful monopolistic oligarchies whose rational control of technology would lead to some form of merit-ocracy. Émile Durkheim was an early contributor to the first theme,¹ claiming that professional organisations were a precondition of consensus in industrial societies, and that the break-up of the traditional moral order initiated by the fragmenting division of labour would be rectified only by the formation of moral communities based upon occupational membership. The professions, he believed, ‘should become so many moral milieux’,² with the function of bringing cohesion to a society ‘lacking in stability, whose discipline it is easy to escape and whose existence is not always felt…’.³ He saw the professions as distinct from ‘a whole range of collective activity outside the sphere of morals… and almost entirely removed from the moderating effects of obligations’.⁴ This was the milieu of industry and trade in which individuals, while connected by competition, shared no common life of which the corporate occupational body was an expression. In England, Tawney also looked for an enlargement of professionalism.⁵ In the ‘acquisitive society’, he believed, community interest had been subverted by the primacy of individual self-interest, and professionalism was the major force capable of subjugating rampant individualism to the needs of the community in a truly ‘functional society’.

While Durkheim viewed professional ethics as the fount of a new moral order, others have gone a step further by specifying the content of professionally engendered morality. For example, it has been suggested that professions are to be distinguished from other occupations by their altruism which is expressed in the ‘service’ orientation of professional men. In rejecting Laski’s view that the debilitating individualism fostered by the existing professional institutions could only be countered by the creation of ‘a great corporation under government control’, T. H. Marshall (1939) claimed that state control would threaten the very ‘essence’ of professionalism:

It [individualism] may mean the belief that the individual is the true unit of service, because service depends on individual qualities and individual judgement supported by individual responsibility which cannot be shifted onto the shoulders of others. That, I believe, is the essence of professionalism and it is not concerned with self-interest, but with the welfare of the client. (1939, pp. 158-9)

The view that the professions are actuated by the common good was restated by Talcott Parsons (1954), who pointed out that while business and the professions shared much in common in industrial societies, the professions were still to be distinguished by their collectivity-orientation rather than self-orientation. For Parsons, such an orientation ensured that science would be applied in the service of man.

More recently, Paul Halmos (1970) has reintroduced a Durkheimian theme in claiming that the professional service ethic is in process of penetrating the ideologies of all groups and institutions in industrial society, including business. In Halmos’s view, while the ethic of ‘personal service’ originates in those professions such as medicine and social work whose ‘principal function is to bring about changes in the psycho-social personality of the client’,¹ it has subsequently spread to influence the self-image of other professional bodies. The ‘personal service professions’ are, he claims, the leaders in the creation of a new moral uniformity, a moral order influencing all industrial societies, whatever their political structure.

Closely connected with the theme of professional altruism has been the claim that the professions have functioned as a bulwark against threats to stable democratic processes. For example, in the 1930s Marshall argued that it was the role of the professions to ‘find for the sick and suffering democracies a peaceful solution of their problems’ (1939, p. 170). But perhaps the most sustained and eloquent expression of this theme is to be found in the work of Carr-Saunders and Wilson (1933), who saw the professions as among the most ‘stable elements in society’. The professions, they claimed,

inherit, preserve and pass on a tradition… they engender modes of life, habits of thought and standards of judgement which render them centres of resistance to crude forces which threaten steady and peaceful evolution.… The family, the church and the universities, certain associations of intellectuals, and above all the great professions, stand like rocks against which the waves raised by these forces beat in vain. (1933, p. 497)

A more recent commentator saw professionally induced stability as operating not only at a national but also at an international level:

Our professional institutions are… an important stabilising factor in our whole society and through their international associations they provide an important channel of communications with the intellectual leaders of other countries, thereby helping to maintain world order.¹

In the 1950s Lewis and Maude (1952) joined with Carr-Saunders and Wilson in identifying the great industrial and governmental bureaucracies as the major threat to the ‘proper’ functioning of the professions in Britain. Carr-Saunders and Wilson were the more optimistic, maintaining that the professions would remain the major social force freeing men from a slavish dependence upon the state behemoth. As an increasing proportion of the working population gained admission to the ‘great’ professions, a larger number would share the institutional base from which men can enjoy a measure of ‘freedom, dignity and responsibility’(1933, p. 503).

The mention of bureaucracy introduces the second major theme of this controversy and a more sceptical view of the role of the professions in modern society. Among social scientists, the economists have most consistently questioned the benefits of professionalism, pointing instead to the harmful monopolistic practices of professional associations.¹ For such critics, the professional corporations are far from anti-bureaucratic; they themselves are bureaucratic mechanisms with the function of enforcing monopolistic practices. Among the sociologists, Weber did not distinguish radically between the consequences of professionalisation and bureaucratisation and specifically linked the process of bureaucratisation with the development of specialised professional education. He saw both processes as expressions of the increasing rationalisation of Western civilisation.² While Weber would have agreed with Carr-Saunders and Wilson that the professions bring ‘knowledge to the service of power’, he saw this convergence not as a limitation upon the exercise of power through the humanising agency of the professions, but as one element in the process of rationalisation. It was a process in which the professional as technician or expert was caught up in the bureaucrat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Theoretical Approaches: Concepts and Contrasts
• 2 Professionalisation and Professionalism
• 3 Types of Occupational Control
• 4 Collegiate: Professionalism Revisited
• 5 Patronage
• 6 Mediation
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography