PROFESSIONS

The word profession has become so imprecise by inflated usage that it needs to be defined so as to recover its historical meaning. From sports to hairdressing, all sorts of occupations have started to claim the adjective professional in order to suggest a degree of competence beyond the amateur level. Originally the English noun profession derived from the Latin verb profiteri, indicating the act of professing, that is, declaring something publicly. In contrast to a mere craft or trade, this linguistic derivation implies the pursuit of a livelihood that is based upon specialized knowledge beyond a mere skill and directed less toward private gain than toward rendering a public service. Through their transformation from learned guilds to modern self-governing associations, professions have come to be defined as special kinds of occupations based on higher learning, organized autonomously and dedicated to serving society.

traits of a profession

During the course of the nineteenth century the traditional "learned" occupations gradually became modern professions by acquiring such traits as specialized knowledge, rigorous examinations, independent associations, and autonomous practice. To begin with, the expertise of so-called professionals such as theologians, lawyers, and doctors rested on a broad liberal education in the classics, which endowed the holder with an aura of being a "gentleman." Increasingly, it went beyond scholarly information and included scientific training that made it possible for professionals not just to apply memorized rules of the craft but also to address problems creatively by researching new solutions. Nonetheless, there remained an important component of practical competence that codified the accumulated wisdom gathered from the actual practice of the profession in the past. This unique blend of cultivation, expertise, and experience set professionals apart from their predecessors and untrained competitors.

Professional expertise had to be learned during an extensive period of study that combined elements of apprenticeship with formal academic instruction. The polish of liberal education was generally acquired by boys in classical secondary schools such as boarding schools in Britain, lycées in France, or Gymnasien in Germany. Scholarly information was accumulated and scientific methods were assimilated subsequently during university study, whether at British colleges, French hautes écoles, or German Universitäten. Usually practical experience (Berufswissen) was gathered in some kind of apprenticeship as a probationary preacher at a church, as an intern in a law firm, or as a famulus helping an established physician. This lengthy process of training tended to be costly and could therefore be afforded only by members of the middle class.

In order to persuade a wary public of the proven expertise of professionals, a rigorous set of examinations was established so as to weed out the incompetent. While university access required some kind of demonstration of success at secondary school (A-levels, the bac, or the Abitur), the entry examinations into a profession, which were administered either by committees of experienced practitioners or by panels of government officials, tested both academic knowledge and practical competence. Public proof of passing was a degree that bestowed a title like Herr Doktor, certified in a diploma, which could be hung on the wall. Intended to keep charlatans from practicing on an unsuspecting public, this examination also served as social gate-keeping to bar undesirable elements and to restrict the number of newcomers in order to assure a comfortable living.

For the sake of sharing information and sociability, the practitioners of these elevated occupations tended to band together in so-called professional associations. Originally local, these societies gradually evolved into regional and national organizations so as to pursue their common interests more vigorously. To begin with, such groups merely provided social contacts that helped cushion competition between rival professionals. With time, lectures and congresses also made it possible to share in the further advancement of knowledge, especially important in the medical fields. More important yet were the efforts to promote the interests of the members by taking public positions, lobbying legislators, and influencing bureaucrats. During the nineteenth century, these initially social associations therefore increasingly transformed into vigorous professional interest groups.

In contrast to government servants or business people, professionals generally insisted on autonomy and on self-policing. Describing themselves as disinterested in material gain, the professions claimed to serve the public best when following the dictates of their expertise and not obeying bureaucratic orders. That meant that they

observed an independent standard of judgment, based on rational problem-solving rather than self-interest. In order to guard against an abuse of autonomy, the members elaborated extensive "codes of professional ethics" that defined what practitioners were allowed to do and imposed severe penalties in case of violations. Usually professional associations had ethics committees that possessed the power to punish errant members in order to reassure the public of the integrity of the remaining professionals. But since colleagues were often reluctant to censure each other, this arrangement worked only in really crass cases of malfeasance.

professionalization as process

A product of this internal transformation, the process of professionalization led to the displacement of competitors, a gain in practical authority, and imitation by other occupations, which resulted in a rapid increase in the number of practitioners as well as of professional groups during the nineteenth century. As mentioned above, one central element in this success was the shift from practical experience to scholarly knowledge or scientific methods in the resolution of problems. This involved questioning traditional practices and supplanting them with new solutions that provided superior results. In the area of medicine this change was most dramatic, since the introduction of antibacterial and antiviral drugs triggered a quantum leap in successful cures and turned physicians from psychological advisors or recorders of death into effective healers of disease. Even if theologians or lawyers did not develop comparable advances in problem solving, they could also trade on the "scientific" aura that their advanced training provided.

As a result of being able to offer actual benefits based on their institutional education, professionals gradually succeeded in displacing their academically uneducated and nonlicensed rivals. For centuries, university-trained practitioners had been forced to compete with untutored lay preachers, uncertified legal advisors, and academically untrained midwives or other folk healers. Backed by scholarly instruction and academic examinations, professional organizations demanded a monopoly of practice for their respective trade, insisting on civil penalties for charlatans or amateurs. In most cases this lobbying effort was successful in reserving professional titles like "attorney" for the academically trained and in forbidding public advertising by their rivals. In churches, courts, and hospitals, professionals thereby erected a monopoly of practice, which claimed to protect the public from malpractice, but in effect also guaranteed an elevated standard of living to licensed practitioners.

Professionalization also meant that the professions succeeded in reversing the power relationship between patrons and practitioners. In the early modern period the nobility and wealthy members of the middle class condescended to employ the services of practitioners who were their social inferiors, firing them at will if the results did not please them. But during the nineteenth century, the claim of superior knowledge proved strong enough to endow the professional with unassailable authority, because he could now decide questions of life and death on the basis of scientific evidence. As a result, the erstwhile superior patron eventually became a supplicant client who had to compete for the services of prominent professionals and follow their instructions to the letter unless he wanted to risk dire consequences. This reversal of the power relationship raised the social standing of the professions in general.

Another facet of the transformation was the competition of newer occupations for elevation to the attractive status of a profession. Most of these pretenders came from the graduates of the arts and sciences faculty, such as the teachers of academic secondary schools, who campaigned tirelessly for acceptance among the ranks of the professions. Although not free practitioners like lawyers and doctors, university-trained educators wanted to gain control over their classrooms, obtain permission to organize, and achieve similar remuneration as their fellow graduates in other fields. In Germany, the Gymnasium teachers succeeded in getting nominal parity in the last decades before World War I, receiving a new title, Studienrat, which was modeled on the already existing designations Konsistorialrat, Justizrat, and Medizinalrat. But their elevation meant that primary schoolteachers would continue to be excluded from university training and superior rank. Another group of pretenders that had somewhat indifferent success were the graduates of new technical institutions, such as engineers.

The general increase in material prosperity created a rising demand for professional services that triggered an impressive expansion in the numbers of professionals throughout the nineteenth century. Whereas there were only a few thousand pastors, lawyers, and doctors in most countries during the early nineteenth century, one hundred years later their number had multiplied about tenfold. For instance in England the size of eight professions had risen to 191,384 by 1922, in France the number of liberal professionals and intellectuals reached 122,257 by 1906, and in Germany the increase reached 335,252 by 1933. While the number of theologians only modestly increased, the figure for lawyers and doctors multiplied steeply, and the share of practitioners in new professions such as teaching or engineering virtually exploded. This development also shifted the balance somewhat away from the traditional learned professions toward new white-collar callings in government and industry. In spite of the expansion, the overall share of the professions in the workforce remained rather limited, not surpassing 2 percent before World War I.

The rapid expansion was, however, not a linear success story, but rather a crisis-ridden process marked by cycles of oversupply of educated men. In central Europe the post-Napoleonic expansion reached a peak in the early 1830s, producing much-lamented unemployment of university graduates and impoverishment among beginning professionals. As a result, higher-education enrollments fell, and a deficit of professionals developed by the 1860s. This perceived lack of trained experts encouraged a second expansion cycle, which peaked in the late 1880s, triggering another over-crowding crisis and producing a veritable "academic proletariat." Government efforts to steer these academic cycles, demanded by the professions, were generally ineffectual, because restrictions, if they came too late, only exaggerated the deficits, and calls for higher enrollment added to the subsequent oversupply. Academic unemployment tended to have deleterious political consequences, since it fed into the unrest behind the Revolution of 1848 in France and into the radicalization of the intelligentsia in Russia.

As a result of their proliferation, the professions gradually transformed the face of the noneconomic middle class. In contrast to the financiers, industrialists, or merchants, professionals were not primarily interested in accumulating wealth, but rather propounded an ethos of public service. While they competed in a market of their own, this competition was regulated by barring rivals and insisting on ethical behavior. Unlike university trained bureaucrats, many professionals were not directly employed by the state either, and could therefore practice more freely, without having to obey political pressures or bureaucratic mandates. This intermediary position within the middle class, without a fixed salary but also without direct supervision, made professions an attractive calling, because they provided considerable freedom for personal choice. As a result, the professional ideal exerted a powerful pull on university graduates, since such a life promised to liberate them somewhat from the twin evils of the market and the government.

patterns of professionalism

Although the process of professionalization was universal in character, its institutional pattern varied considerably according to national context. Ironically, the British experience of the "self-governing professions," which is often taken as the classic case, was actually somewhat peculiar because of weak academic training and lack of state regulation. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, young professionals were essentially apprenticed to older practitioners at the Inns of Court or the Royal Colleges of Physicians and examined by "qualifying associations." Only in later decades could the development of the red-brick universities begin to shift more of the training back into higher education, but testing remained a prerogative of the professional organizations. Hence the strength of autonomy regulated by ethics and the freedom from bureaucratic control provided an inspiring model, but proved surprisingly unique.

In contrast, the French case of state supervision is more typical of the Continental pattern, albeit with a peculiar competitive twist. In its enthusiasm for les carrières ouvertes aux talents (careers open to talent), the French Revolution abolished the traditional self-governing corporations and introduced unrestricted competition that destroyed solidarity. Ironically, Napoleon I (r. 1804–1814/15) reestablished the professions under tight government control, allowing collective representation to the lawyers alone, leaving the rest fragmented. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did French professionals manage to restore some of their associations and regain a measure of collective identity through a revitalization of university training and restrictions on competition. Lawyers in particular succeeded so much in politics that critics called the Third Republic a République des avoués (republic of lawyers). Less successful was the rapidly growing group of writers, artists, and journalists, dividing the educated therefore between professionals and intellectuals.

The German variant of the process, with strong state involvement and academic training, has been called "professionalization from above." From the late eighteenth century on, the introduction of a series of rigorous state examinations for clergymen, lawyers, doctors, and eventually also teachers created bureaucratically controlled academic occupations whose members were intensively trained at the universities. During the middle of the nineteenth century, liberal opinion forced the government to disestablish the medical (1869) and legal (1879) professions, allowing them to enter into free practice and to establish powerful professional associations. However, in the wake of the overcrowding crisis of the 1880s, many professionals gravitated toward establishing a kind of neocorporatism characterized by self-governing chambers with public authority that might restrict competition and reestablish a suitable income. The central European pattern therefore consisted of a mixture of practitioner self-assertion within a framework of bureaucratic control.

Although the state was strongest in Russia, a limited kind of professionalism emerged under the tsars as well. Initially, the weakness of primary and secondary schooling as well as the hierarchical structure of estate society and the heavy hand of the bureaucracy left little room for the emergence of independent professions. But in the wake of the reforms set in place by Alexander II (r. 1855–1881), academic practitioners began to band together, founded their first associations, and became active in the liberal zemstvo (local government) movement that tried to modernize Russian society from the bottom up. Frustrated by the slow pace of reform, the often unemployed higher-education graduates around the turn of the century began to join the radical intelligentsia instead, trying to promote revolutionary change.

In the smaller European countries, the pattern of professionalization tended to reflect the arrangements of the larger state that served as chief cultural reference point, modified somewhat by local tradition. The traditional model of corporate self-government of the professions survived longest in Italy. The British practitioner-control system was rare, except for a similar grassroots approach in Switzerland. The French mixture of state control and market freedom somewhat influenced the Belgian practice. The German example of professionalization from above could be found in Austria, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Greece. Finally, the Russian pattern of delayed professionalism coupled with a radical intelligentsia became typical of the emerging eastern European and Balkan countries. Beyond a basic similarity in the overall thrust of professionalization, cross-national comparison therefore reveals a bewildering variety of time sequences and institutional arrangements.

problems of professionalization

The spread of the modern professions throughout Europe should, however, not obscure the existence of a series of fundamental problems associated with the process of professionalization. One of the key conflicts concerned the tension between professed altruism and practiced self-interest. Especially in treating legal or medical clients, individual practitioners faced many choices between rational reasoning or personal gain, which could not be governed by codes of ethics. When trying to get public approval for expanding their prerogatives, following their advice, or undertaking social reforms, the professions collectively resorted to arguments that claimed service to society through better justice, health, or technology. However, behind these unselfish protestations often lurked material considerations of barring competition, raising fees, or carving out new areas of practice. The discrepancy between pious protestations and crass abuses time and again tarnished the image of professions so that they could be ridiculed in satire.

Another area of contestation was the loss of public accountability in the face of expert authority. No doubt, the switch from oral tradition to a scholarly knowledge base and from old wives' tales to scientific medicines, just to pick one example, was on the whole beneficial. But the displacement of unlicensed competitors also made advice in matters of religion, law, or medicine unavailable to the working masses, who could not afford to pay for professional counsel. Moreover, the rise of academic medicine also ruptured traditions of folk-healing, not all of which were ineffective, as the recent rediscovery of herbal medicine shows. Instead of being responsible for its own decisions, part of the public became accustomed to deferring to the opinions of professionals also in matters where they were hardly any better informed. Already around the turn of the twentieth century critics, especially life-reformers, began to rail against excesses of "medicalization" and against similar losses of independence in law and education.

The politics of professionalization were also not unproblematic, since the general promotion of liberalization tended to give way to restrictive responses in moments of crisis. No doubt, the advancement of professionalism was generally associated with the rise of liberalism in the nineteenth century, since many of the leaders of liberal parties were lawyers, doctors, or educators. Aspiring professionals bought into the broader project of lifting the heavy hand of state so as to allow the emergence of a self-governing civil society, because they wanted to carve out an area of free practice for themselves. However, they did not envisage totally free competition, but rather preferred a regulated kind of freedom in which the state would protect their monopoly, guarantee a suitable standard of living, and follow their professional advice in questions of public policy. When threatened by overcrowding, assault on their privileges, or general impoverishment, the professions often entered alliances with conservative forces in order to protect their hard-won prerogatives.

A drastic case in point is the struggle over the admission of outsiders such as proletarians, Jews, or women, in which insiders used social prejudices and legal prohibitions to prevent their entry. As they could not be kept completely out, "undesirable" newcomers from the lower orders tended to be channeled into peripheral and subordinate positions. Jews had to overcome much social prejudice in western Europe, and they were forced to congregate in law and medicine in central Europe, because they were largely barred from state employment. In the more restrictive eastern Europe they had even less of a chance. The so-called weaker sex was excluded from the professions until the turn of the twentieth century by inferior secondary schooling that did not permit admission to university study and therefore prevented graduation. When social reformers managed to open higher education (in Prussia as late as 1907–1908), heated battles ensued over the acceptance of women into the professions, even if they had managed to acquire the right kind of credentials. Eventually the barriers were breached, especially in areas that seemed suited to the talents of "social mothering" such as in nursing or primary school teaching.

attractions of professionalism

In spite of its attendant problems, the rise of the professions in the nineteenth century profoundly reshaped the lives of the educated middle class. All across Europe the traditional learned pursuits began to formalize academic training, tightened up entrance examinations, improved the standards of practice, founded associations, and struggled for greater autonomy. In short, they refashioned themselves into modern professions: in England the free professions became the dominant form of the noneconomic middle class; in France professionalized officials vied with the intellectual literati; in the German speaking countries, the akademische Berufsstände (academically trained pursuits) reorganized themselves along professional lines; in the Slavic societies national and liberal professionals competed with the radical intelligentsia. While the specific institutional arrangements varied drastically, the general thrust of professional development therefore transformed the noneconomic middle class.

The professional social ideal proved so attractive because it suggested a fulfilling lifestyle, free from the constraints of the market and from the dictates of the bureaucracy. The academic knowledge base provided a superior competence that could outflank various rivals; the autonomy of practice allowed an independent existence that was able to follow its own preferences; the association of like-minded individuals offered a sense of community and an instrument for pursuing collective interests. Compared with other occupations in the economy and government, these were powerful advantages, even if professional life contained its own risks of intellectual failure, economic insecurity, and personal ostracism. Most powerful for many was, however, the ideal of service to the public that justified personal exertion and collective privileges. The novels of the British writer Archibald Joseph Cronin (1896–1981) describe this professional ideal as a kind of secular faith in the bettering of humanity that required personal sacrifice.

The success of professionalization therefore rested on persuasive public representations of the idealism of some practitioners and the provision of superior services. In speeches at their congresses and the pages of their journals, the professional associations conveyed a positive self-image to the public that stressed the altruism as well as the real benefits of their practice. Journalistic portrayals made the dedication of famous researchers like Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) or Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) into "culture heroes" whose contributions were more constructive than those of poets or musicians, because they helped solve social problems. Graphic descriptions of the proliferation of new technologies based on chemistry, electronics, or the internal combustion engine also pointed to concrete advances that improved the lives of many people. With such powerful arguments, professionals could therefore claim that in the conduct of research, the growth of economies, the solution of social problems, and the governing of states the contributions of competent experts were becoming indispensable.

See alsoBourgeoisie; Education; Engineers; Intellectuals; Intelligentsia; Nurses;

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