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The Professionalization of Everyone?
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1964
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Client OrientationsLawWork OrganizationOrganization ScienceHuman Resource ManagementProfessional EthicOrganizational BehaviorBureaucracyProfessional PreparationManagementPopular GeneralizationPerformance StudiesIn-service Professional DevelopmentOrganizational CommunicationWorkforce DevelopmentBusinessOrganizational CareerProfessional DevelopmentArtsOccupational ScienceService Occupations
Occupations are increasingly described as professionalized, a label applied to growing specialization, standards, tenure, licensing, and service roles. This paper contends that understanding professional organization requires focusing on the traditional model of professionalism—autonomous expertise and a service ideal—rather than the loose criteria. By tracing the histories of eighteen occupations, the authors identify a typical process of professionalization and analyze how an optimal technical base—neither too vague nor too narrow—supports exclusive jurisdiction. The study finds that deviations arise from power struggles and status quests, that barriers include bureaucratic erosion of the service ideal and client orientation undermining norms, and that only a few occupations attain established professional authority, warning against overusing the term “professionalization.”.
A popular generalization is that occupations are becoming "professionalized". The label is loosely applied to increasing specialization and transferability of skill, the proliferation of objective standards of work, the spread of tenure arrangements, licensing, or certification, and the growth of service occupations. This paper argues that these loose criteria are less essential for understanding professional organization than the traditional model of professionalism which emphasizes autonomous expertise and the service ideal. Examination of the history of eighteen occupations uncovers a typical process by which the established professions have arrived. Among newer and marginal "professions," deviations from the process can be explained by power struggles and status strivings common to all occupations. Barriers to professionalization are pinpointed. Analisis of the optimal "technical" base for professionalism suggests that knowledge or doctrine which is too general and vague or too narrow and specific provides a weak base for an exclusive jurisdiction. Data on the clash between professional, organizational, and client orientations among 490 professors, lawyers, and engineers suggest that (1) bureaucracy may enfeeble the service ideal more than it threatens autonomy; (2) a client orientation undermines colleague control and professional norms. The main theme: (1) very few occupations will achieve the authority of the established professions; (2) if we call everything professionalization, we obscure the newer structural forms now emerging.