Professions

Sociology of Professions versus Sociology of Professionalism

In standard language, the term profession refers to the occupational groups that enjoy societal recognition for their expert knowledge. Social scientists generally discuss as professional occupations organized groups of practitioners who do knowledge-based work and whose practice is formally regulated. From a sociocultural perspective, professional occupations are associated with social rewards and authority. From having been an important theme particularly for post-World War II sociology in the United States, the study of professional groups had become a narrow specialty interest by the 1980s until the revival of interest in the topic in the 1990s.

The terms profession and professional were adopted by the social sciences at the beginning of the 19th century for the discussions on the emerging social dynamics of modern working life. Although some scholars merely echoed the linguistic developments in society, others wanted to reserve the term profession in sociology for a particular category of occupations. Following a century of debates, social scientists remain divided on the issue of whether profession can be treated as a sociological concept to theorize the position of core occupations, or whether it should be treated as a folk concept, a word that laypeople use to refer to certain occupations. Freidson, an influential proponent of the latter stand, argued that the term profession must be used in a specific historical and national sense, not as a scientific concept generalizable to a wide variety of settings. In this vein, the mainstream of the field known as the sociology of professions employs as analytical concepts those of “professional projects” and “professionalism,” aspiring to distinguish sociological categorization from the categories that the people under study employ when defining their collective social pursuits in working life.

The scholarship focusing on professional occupations goes back to the work of social science classics such as Éntile Durkheim and Max Weber. These early European social scientists showed an interest in occupational groups and professionalism when developing their macro-level theories about social organization. Both recognized the linkage between division of labor and social order, but it assigned a different role for agency. Weber famously developed an analysis of social closure, that is, of how monopolies develop in different areas of society, including working life. Durkheim, in his turn, assumed that occupations were developing into organizations that organize social life in conditions of organic solidarity, where work rather than kinship would be a basis of identity and social relations. Accordingly, in his view, occupational groups were moral communities that are fundamental for modern society. Both of these views inspired later scholarship, but the subfield of sociology of occupations and professions that came to being in the 1940s was a U.S. development. It built on a tradition of political liberalism that provided grounds for defining key occupations as social institutions in civil society that should be autonomous from the state.

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