Professionalism: The Third Logic by Eliot Freidson

Author:Eliot Freidson [Freidson, Eliot]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

Part II

The Contingencies

of Professionalism

6

States and Associations

I discussed in the five chapters of part I what I consider to be the interdependent elements of the ideal type, professionalism. They are:

1 specialized work in the officially recognized economy that is believed to be grounded in a body of theoretically based, discretionary knowledge and skill and that is accordingly given special status in the labor force;

2 exclusive jurisdiction in a particular division of labor created and controlled by occupational negotiation;

3 a sheltered position in both external and internal labor markets that is based on qualifying credentials created by the occupation;

4 a formal training program lying outside the labor market that produces the qualifying credentials, which is controlled by the occupation and associated with higher education; and

5 an ideology that asserts greater commitment to doing good work than to economic gain and to the quality rather than the economic efficiency of work.

The ideology claims both specialized knowledge that is authoritative in a functional or cognitive sense and commitment to a transcendent value that guides and adjudicates the way that knowledge is employed.

Ideal-typical professionalism is of course an intellectual construct and not a portrayal of any real occupation. It is intended to serve as a stable standard by which to appraise and analyze historic occupations whose characteristics vary in time and place. Some occupations may come to closely resemble that ideal type in some places at some moments of history, the process by which this occurs being called professionalization. In other places, or at other moments of history, that resemblance may diminish during the course of what has been called deprofessionalization. Many of the historic studies I have cited in this book have been devoted to analyzing the professionalization of such occupations as medicine, law, engineering, science, and university teaching during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Larson’s (1977) being the most sweeping and influential. But in light of changes in the political economies of industrial nations that affected the status of professions during the latter part of the twentieth century, the emphasis of many recent analysts has been instead on the process of deprofessionalization. The problem facing those dealing with both processes is to understand the forces which support or impede the development and maintenance of professionalism.

Portions of this chapter have been published previously in Freidson 1999a.

The prime contingency of professionalism is the state and its policies. I use the term loosely to refer to the sovereign political authority which has the power to grant occupations special status in an official economy. In earlier times, the authority was the sovereign. Later it became the nation-state. Now, it may very well be becoming some transnational authority, as in Europe, where the European Union moves toward “harmonizing” the labor and trade policies of its component nations. Some even see the emergence of a global international authority (see Evetts 1999). Keeping this broad usage in mind, we can say that none of the ideal-typical institutions of professionalism could exist without the support of the state. It is

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