 |
|
|
Professions in History In modern historical scholarship, the professions include the occupations of doctors, lawyers, professors, and engineers, among others. Professions are characterized by special functions and structures, motives, representations, forms of knowledge, and sociocultural styles. Professionalization refers to processes affecting the social and symbolic construction of occupation and status. The history of the professions investigates the ways in which functional groups and status groups are regulated and institutionalized. It shows how meanings, functions, and structures develop in social and temporal context and how professions, in the restricted sense of the term, differ from the status groups and occupations of entrepreneurs, merchants and clerks, skilled manual workers (crafts, metiers) and the so-called semi-profession. Professionalization involves the formation of an occupation, on one hand, and interrelated developments regarding the social division of labor, structures of authority, and sociocultural inequality, on the other. Historical research on professionalization concentrates on such issues as the distribution of scarce resources at a particular point in time, the social definition of behavioral prerogatives, and the regulation of central values and functions. It is concerned with the motives, interests, and strategies of actors who either promote or hinder processes of professionalization. Recent historical research on professionalization has tended to oscillate between individualizing historical perspectives and systematic social science perspectives. The former emphasize the peculiarities of particular professions or the special features of the professions in a particular historical context. The latter concentrate on general features and tendencies. Historical and comparative research shows that, while the professions are often concerned with the same or similar functions, problems, and tasks, these may be interpreted in different ways and institutionalized in different contexts. Similarly, depending on the characteristics of a particular profession and on the particular historical circumstances, the paths, cycles, and types of professionalization and deprofessionalization may vary. By taking these points into consideration, scholars have relativized both teleological understandings of professionalization and static conceptions of the professions. Conceptions and History of Professionalization and Professions The history of the professions begins in the Middle Ages and in the early modern era with the autonomous corporate colleges of the higher professions (lawyers, physicians, university professors) and the lower professions such as surgeons and notaries (Prest 1986, Betri and Pastore 1997). The various professions have specific orders of knowledge. They enjoy privileges with regard to education, the control of access to the professions, the practice of the professions, and ethical monitoring. The specific way of earning a livelihood distinguishes the higher professions from commercial occupations and handicrafts. The institutional pattern and the mentalities of the old European corporate occupational culture varied according to the degree of the abstraction of knowledge and the social proximity to the nobility, the patriciate, and the urban bourgeoisie. As a rule, the right to practice a profession was limited to a specific territory. The traditional culture of the professions came under pressure and began to dissolve in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the authoritarian and bureaucratic societies of Europe, the reformed professions were ruled under the control of the state. In radical-liberal, democratic, and egalitarian societies such as France in the revolutionary era, the United States, and Switzerland in the mid-nineteenth century, the professions were largely deregulated or were established as free trades (Ramsey 1984; Siegrist 1988, 1996). The general orientation of the different professions varied between (a) loyalty to and dependence on the state, (b) a progressive-liberal worldview, and (c) the desire to defend or revitalize traditional Professional cultures and corporate mentalities. Different professions displayed many similarities with regard to the level of education, the orientation toward science and scholarship, and the social position of their groups often competed with one another for cultural hegemony, social prestige, and political power.
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|