professions. In English, the word ‘profession’ has since the 16th cent. been applied to a limited number of occupations in which a specific body of knowledge is used to solve problems for clients. By the 18th cent. these involved a social status well above that of trade and handicrafts and included the upper ranks of law, medicine, the church, and maybe the military. The authority of knowledge was often linked to the status of gentleman, which many had by birth, and others gained by achievement.

Social and economic change in the first half of the 19th cent. brought many challenges to the authority of the ‘traditional’ professions. The medical men faced rising expectations, the failure of urban public health, and public anger over body-snatching and dissection. The lawyers met the demands of the rational law reformers and the ridicule of people like Charles Dickens in his account of Chancery in Bleak House. The authority of the church was already compromised by the disputes between establishment and dissent. The military met mid-century condemnation for the incompetence of the Crimean War.

Response centred upon the reform and creation of a series of qualifying associations. There were 7 in 1800, 20 more by 1880, to which 39 were added by 1914. They sought to control entry, to set standards, and ultimately to supervise training and the development of professional knowledge. The British Medical Association was formed in 1856 and its authority gained legislative backing in 1858. It had developed from the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association (1834) which itself had recognized that the old division between physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries had been replaced in functional terms by the general practitioner. The Law Society, founded in 1825, came to supervise examinations in the 1870s. New areas of knowledge and knowledge application also organized. The Institute of Civil Engineers, founded in 1818, came to supervise examinations in the 1890s. Other groups, such as schoolteachers, did not gain full control of entry and work conditions but a variety of organizations worked to raise standards and improve public perception of their work. By 1900, an increasing amount of professional training was taking place in universities and colleges, rather than through the personal relationship of apprenticeships.

The 20th cent. not only saw a rapid increase in the areas of work and knowledge regarded as professional but also fundamental changes in the workplace relationships of many professions. In the 19th cent., doctors, lawyers, and self-employed schoolteachers collected fees directly from clients. A few like the poor law surgeon from the 1830s and the school board teacher (1870/2) had begun to work for salaries. After 1900, this trend accelerated. Professional people worked for a growing number of state agencies and private sector corporate bodies. Here they joined a new group of career salaried managers, who applied new management ‘science’ to industrial organization and created their own professional organizations. Professional and managerial occupations accounted for less than 10 per cent of the occupied male population in 1900 but grew to around 20 per cent by the 1970s. They were distinguished from wage labour by a greater degree of workplace autonomy, by better working conditions, and often by career progression, sick pay, holidays with pay, and pensions. In some senses the emphasis on service and standards, and on status derived from knowledge and training, challenged profit and capital accumulation in the value system of British society. At the same time the experience and often the ideological views of professionals in the public sector were very different from those in the private sector, where the market and profits still dominated, although usually mediated by professionals like accountants.

R. J. Morris