professions

professions, professionalism, professionalization Respectively a form of work organization, a type of work orientation (see WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF), and a highly effective process of interest group control. As an organizational form, a profession includes some central regulatory body to ensure the standard of performance of individual members; a code of conduct; careful management of knowledge in relation to the expertise which constitutes the basis of the profession's activities; and, lastly, control of numbers, selection, and training of new entrants. Max Weber contrasted professions with bureaucracy, and regarded them as the paradigm form of collegiate authority, in which rational-legal power is based on representative democracy and leaders in principle are first among equals.

The work orientation of the professional supposedly entails exclusive concern with the intrinsic rewards and performance of a task, and is typically associated with personal services involving confidentiality and high trust, as found for example in medicine, education, religion and the law. In the mainstream of the sociology of work and organizations, professionalism is contrasted with bureaucracy, and the so-called bureaucratic mentality.

Recent sociological work has tended to view professionalization as the establishment of effective interest-group control over clients with socially constructed problems as a method of exercising power in society. This approach treats professional ethics as an ideology, rather than an orientation necessarily adhered to, or meaningful in practice. Entry and knowledge controls function as a form of status exclusion from privileged and remunerative employment In this respect, professional organizations make an interesting comparison with trade unions, for although formal professional ethics preclude collective bargaining and industrial conflict, in practice many associations have found themselves becoming more unionate, whilst many unions practise quasi-professional job-entry control. From the huge literature of potential relevance to this entry (much relevant material occurs, for example, in discussion of labour-markets, gender, and the sociology of medicine) see Andrew Abbott , The System of Professions (1988)
, Eliot Friedson , Professional Powers (1986)
, and (for an interesting case-study) Paul Starr , The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982)
. See also CLOSURE.