Institutionalization of Professional Training

The specific way in which education and training are institutionalized plays a central role in processes of professionalization. The states of the European continent led the way in the creation of theoretically and scientifically based training programs and in the transfer of such programs to (reformed) universities and elite institutions of higher learning such as the French Grandes E_coles. On the other hand, it is also true that (complementary) training through practice survived and even retained a central importance (trainees in state agencies, mandatory internships with practitioners, or, for example, when the first Professional years serve, in effect, as a sort of apprenticeship). In Anglo-Saxon countries, the transition from ‘training on the job’ or ‘shop culture’ to ‘school culture’ has intensified since the late nineteenth century (Lundgreen 1990). A comparison of the length of time required for professional training in different countries reveals significant differences, even for the same occupation. Some of these differences may be attributed to variations in the contents of training programs, while others depend on factors such as tradition, restrictive state policies affecting the labor market, or the exclusive strategies of the professions themselves.

The Institutionalization of Professions

Beginning in the eighteenth century, it is important to distinguish between the legal institutionalization of the professions by the state, on one hand, and the formalization and regulation that is intended and implemented by the occupational groups themselves, on the other. With regard to the latter, one must also distinguish among (a) the continual development of a premodern profession, which, in principle, was never dissolved (such as the English ‘bar’); (b) the restructuring of professions, which had been temporarily deinstitutionalized (as was the case with physicians and lawyers in the United States); and (c) the formation of new professions by members of functional and occupational groups that first arose in the nineteenth century (especially engineers but also a number of other ‘new’ professions). All of these involve long processes, which typically culminate in accreditation through the state or the legislation. In much of Europe, the state or the government or legislation took the initiative to regulate and institutionalize the professions (Siegrist 1996; Ramsey 1984; McClelland et al. 1995). The state, as the guarantor of the legal order, the promoter of culture, and as an intervening force in society, needed professional services and provided the professions with knowledge, rights, and duties. In this way, the state distinguished the professions symbolically from the occupations and functional roles of business, commerce, and agriculture, which had been deregulated through the abolition of guilds and the liberalization of the trades. Henceforth, the professions included only those vocations that were occupied with central goods and values or with securing property, honor, health, public order, morality, and science. In this new configuration of the professions, the old European conceptions of profession, guild and vocation were combined with the ideas of progress, order, and freedom.

In contrast to liberal and democratic societies, monarchical, bureaucratic, and statist societies tend to define professionals as civil servants and to establish a specific hierarchy of the professions: at the pinnacle of this hierarchy are professionals in the civil service, who are followed by state-appointed professionals, then by highly qualified members of the ‘free professions’ and finally by those professionals whose training and practice are not prescribed exactly. In liberal societies, the hierarchy is less pronounced, and the free professions stand at the pinnacle (Siegrist 1996). Since the late nineteenth century, professionals have been increasingly employed in private enterprises such as industrial firms, banks, insurance companies, and research laboratories. The occupational and status groups of professionals who are employees develop their self-understanding with reference to the social types of the civil servant, the free professional, and the entrepreneur.

The professional and social types of the nineteenth century may be characterized as follows:

 (a) Professionals who are ‘civil servants’ are to a great extent bound in the service of the king or the state. If necessary, the individual lawyer, physician, engineer, or professor must disregard Professional criteria and follow the directives of his superior. Due, however, to the increasing recognition of Professional competence and of the indefinite tenure of higher civil servants, specific ideas and forms of Professional autonomy also come into play in the judiciary, in the administration, and in higher education. Professions such as the engineers who were educated in the elite technical colleges in France and then entered into the civil service developed a special esprit de corps (Schweitzer 1999);

(b) Members of ‘state-appointed professions’ are holders of public office. Professionals such as these enjoy a kind of protected market, but they are also monitored closely. Political appointment strengthens the authority of the expert in society but limits his autonomy, impedes the formation of a self-defined collective consciousness of the profession, and makes the organization of professional associations more difficult. Examples include the Prussian, Bavarian, and Austrian lawyers well into the late nineteenth century, the French and Italian court lawyers the Prussian county physicians, and the community physicians of Italy. In the late nineteenth century, some of these state-appointed professions were able to emancipate themselves from state protection, which had come to be viewed as patronizing. Linking discourses on political freedom and the free market with discourses on professional autonomy, they expressed the desire to become ‘truly free professions.’ Since clients increasingly made similar demands, many states changed the corresponding laws and regulations in the last third of the nineteenth century;

(c) The ‘free professions’ are characterized by more elaborate forms of training and examination and distinguished titles. Credentials are derived mostly from the state, but the free professional must be able to adapt to one or more segments of the market for professional services. Minimal standards for both professional and ethical behavior are often regulated by law, at least in principle. In practice, such regulations are enforced either by professional courts of honor (disciplinary bodies with the authority of public law or executive boards of associations with informal authority) or by ordinary courts and clients;

(d) In those areas where professional functions are exercised in the form of free trade, the constraints of the market and the increasing authority of science and scholarship encourage informal processes of professionalization. Professionals are themselves motivated to improve their own qualifications. An elite defines professional qualifications, founds an association, and attempts to marginalize or discredit socalled semi-professional practitioners.