PROFESSIONALIZATION and PROFESSIONALISM

Professions: defining the field

It is necessary to begin by considering earlier disputes and disagreements about the concept of ‘profession' itself before focusing on the concept of professionalism. Some researchers have avoided giving a definition of profession and instead offer a list of relevant occupational groups (e.g. Hanlon 1998 claimed to be following Abbott 1988). Others have used the disagreements and continuing uncertainties about precisely what is a profession, to dismiss the separateness of the intellectual field, although not necessarily to dispute the relevance of current analytical debates. Crompton (1990), for example, considered how paradoxes and contradictions within the sociological debates about professions actually reflected wider and more general tensions in the sociologies of work, occupations and employment.

This paper does approach professions as a generic group of occupations based on knowledge both technical and tacit. It does not, however, attempt to draw a hard-and-fast line between professions and other occupational groups, preferring instead to emphasize the shared characteristics and common processes. Professions are essentially the knowledge-based category of occupations which usually follow a period of tertiary education and vocational training and experience. A different way of categorizing these occupations is to see professions as the structural, occupational and institutional arrangements for dealing with work associated with the uncertainties of modern lives in risk societies. Professionals are extensively engaged in dealing with risk, with risk assessment and, through the use of expert knowledge, enabling customers and clients to deal with uncertainty. To paraphrase and adapt a list in Olgiati et al. (eds 1998), professions are involved in birth, survival, physical and emotional health, dispute resolution and law-based social order, finance and credit information, educational attainment and socialization, physical constructs and the built environment, military engagement, peace-keeping and security, entertainment and leisure, religion and our negotiations with the next world.

In general, however, it no longer seems important to draw a hard definitional line between professions and other occupations but, instead, to regard both as similar social forms which share many common characteristics (Hughes 1958; Crompton 1990). The operational definition of profession can be highly pragmatic. The intellectual field includes the study of occupations which are service and knowledge-based and achieved sometimes following years of higher/further education and specified years of vocational training and experience. Sometimes professional groups are also elites with strong political links and connections, and some professional practitioners are licensed as a mechanism of market closure and occupational control of work. They are primarily middle-class occupations sometimes characterised as the service class (Goldthorpe 1982).

The sociology of professions is a field in which international comparisons have been particularly fruitful. This is illustrated by the productive contrast between Anglo-American approaches, which have tended to concentrate on occupational closure and the creation of what Freidson (1982) called ‘market shelters', and the approach developed in France and elsewhere in continental Europe, where professions are defined somewhat more broadly and where the focus shifts to questions of occupation more generally including occupational identity, career trajectories, professional training and expertise, and employment in public sector organizations. Collins (1990) expressed the contrast in a different way claiming that the Anglo-American ideal-type ‘stresses the freedom of self-employed practitioners to control working conditions' whereas the Continental ideal-type emphasizes ‘elite administrators possessing their offices by virtue of academic credentials' (Collins 1990:15). This is also reflected in different types of professionalization where the former focuses on ‘private government' within an occupation and the latter on the political struggle for control within an elite bureaucratic hierarchy (p.17). Also McClelland (1990:107) distinguishes between ‘professionalization “from within” (successful manipulation of the market by the group) and “from above” (domination of forces external to the group)'. Although this categorization by McClelland was intended to differentiate Anglo-American and (in this case) German forms of professionalization, it will be returned to later in this paper as a way of indicating different occupational usages of, and benefits from, professionalism, as well as how the balance between normative and social control elements is played out differently in different occupational groups. Svensson (2001) has also reminded researchers that in Europe generally professionals have been and are mainly employed in the public sector and closely connected to and controlled by state authorities; only a small minority have been self-employed (see also Burrage and Torstendahl, eds. 1990).

Although some researchers continue to be absorbed by the problem of definition of profession, some general conception such as ‘the occupational control of work' (Freidson 1983); the sociology of middle-class occupations (Dingwall 1996); or theories of occupations of expert labour (Crompton 1990) is probably sufficient to delineate the types of occupation within the intellectual field. Instead it is more fruitful to move on to consider the appeal of the concepts of ‘profession' and particularly of ‘professionalism'. This includes a return to a question asked by Larson (1977) of how a set of practices that characterized medicine and law came to become a rallying cry for engineers, accountants and school teachers, all of whom were in very different employment situation. Now other occupations need adding to Larson's list since pharmacists, social workers, care assistants, librarians, computing experts, the police and the armed forces are claiming to be professions and to demonstrate professionalism in their occupational work. In all of these occupational groups the balance between the normative and social control elements are played out differently. The expansion of the service sector and knowledge work in the developed world and the growth or re-emergence of professions in both developing and transitional societies, indicate the appeal of the concept of ‘professionalism' as well as the strength and persistence of ‘professions' as an occupational form.