Professional Project of Public Relations

The professional project is a concept developed in the sociology of the professions, most notably by Magali Sarfatti Larson in the 1970s, to explain the organization and behavior of professional groups over time. The term refers to an organized effort conducted by an occupational group to capture an area of work and to defend its monopoly. Larson saw the professional project as a process of converting specialist knowledge and skills into economic and social rewards.

Thus to succeed, a professional group needs to develop expertise that can be turned into economic value and to defend its position in a competitive market by acquiring and deploying social resources, such as social prestige and public legitimacy. While the existence of a professional project may not be clear to members of a professional group, it emerges in retrospective analysis as a coherent and clearly directed set of actions undertaken by the professional group over a period of time. The term professional project is often used interchangeably with professionalization.

The concept draws on established approaches and ideas in the sociology of the professions, especially those derived from the work of classical sociologists, such as Max Weber, and extensions of Marxian approaches to knowledge, production, and social stratification; for example, the view that the profession should be understood as a social mobility project directed at achieving social closure. In other words, this line of inquiry focuses on ways in which a profession acts as a group to improve its social position by controlling conditions of inclusion into the professional group and access to work. Thus, the professional project explains the position of a particular professional group in terms of the degree of social closure it has achieved at any particular time by investigating the [Page 691]interrelationship of the following factors: the profession's body of knowledge and its production; the education and training of practitioners; the autonomy to define and control professional work; the ability to control the market for services and define the economic value of the expert's work; the social standing and public legitimacy achieved through representation; access to social elites and power networks; and the profession's relationship with other social actors.

The professional project takes a critical approach to the profession in that it does not take for granted the positive role professions play in society, as argued by Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology. Neither does it accept the view that the profession's prestige and autonomy follow in a straightforward way from the strength of its body of knowledge or value system. The profession is thus seen as an inherently political project.

While the term professional project is not often used in public relations, there is nevertheless an extensive body of work concerned with the various aspects of this phenomenon, usually referred to as professionalization. A number of broad themes can be offered to describe and organize the variety of relevant work, such as the establishment of the occupational group and its institutionalization; public relations ethics; the public image of public relations; the enactment of the professional role in organizational contexts; the institutionalization of practices and types of knowledge; and the feminization of public relations.

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