Sociology of Professions,

The sociology of professions is a branch of the sociology of work concerned with the analysis of
expert occupations. It analyzes their patterns of organization, types of work, and social status. Because the sociology of professions first arose in the UK and the USA, it took its name and much of its early conceptual apparatus from the pattern of expert work characteristic of those countries. In recent years, however, the field has become more international, a change that is transforming both its empirical base and its theoretical superstructure.

Expert Occupations and the Sociology of Professions
The sociology of professions first arose to study the particular social form taken on by expert occupations in England and theUSAin the course of the nineteenth century. This form was characterized by a combination of independent individual practice with some type of collective association. It usually involved specialized education, examination or licensure, service fees, and some form of autonomous discipline. By the early twentieth century, such a form was characteristic of medicine, law, accounting, architecture, and various other fields in the Anglophone world. The first systematic analysis of these ‘professions’ was by Carr-Saunders and Wilson in 1933, who set forth a typological analysis of occupations resting on various ‘traits’ that were taken to characterize the professions. The Carr-Saunders and Wilson analysis had a hard time with the military and the clergy, which were certainly ‘professions’ in the English sense of the term. Moreover, it made no effective contact with the quite different organization of expert work on the continent. The French, for example, have no word with the denotation of the Anglo-American ‘profession.’ The French do distinguish professions liberales, but these include only experts in free individual practice, not all experts of a certain type. Profession itself has much broader purview than the English ‘profession,’ as does the parallel metier. Moreover, the organization of French experts has historically been far more statedependent than has that of Anglo-American ones. Nor was France the only problem. The word and concept of profession were no closer to the German culture of expertism than to the French. Indeed, the characteristic pattern for organizing expert workers on the continent has more often been through quasicivil service arrangements than through autonomous ‘professional’ ones. The sociology of professions thus began as a study of a particular kind of expert occupation. Only gradually have historical and comparative study made the limiting character of that approach clear.