UNDERSTANDING PROFESSIONS

Understanding Professions

Understanding Professions

The term profession has been applied to a much broader range of occupations than those listed above, including advertising, the clergy, consulting, education, investment banking, and nursing (Johnson, 2008). The fact that that such a diverse range of occupations can be grouped together reflects the extremely fluid definitional boundaries of the term. Some of these professions, such as nursing, maintain barriers to entry through professional bodies and processes of accreditation and retain the reputation for high ethical standards; however they have lost, or never won, superior social status and levels of remuneration (Greenwood, 2008). Others, such as investment banking, enjoy the social status and financial rewards associated with being perceived as professionals, without maintaining entry barriers or the reputation for high ethical standards (Freidson, 2008).

Trait-based researchers emphasized the following dynamic. Individuals turned to professionals for help in times of crisis. They sought access to a professional's esoteric expertise that he (and it was almost always he at the time when these studies were done) had gained through a protracted period of formal education and an apprentice-style process of on-the-job training (DiMaggio, 2007). The combination of personal vulnerability and information asymmetry placed the professional in a position of considerable power. However, he could be relied on not to exploit this power because he was motivated by a strong sense of vocation and public service (Abbott, 2006). According to trait-based theorists, therefore, these twin characteristics of esoteric expertise and service ethic justified the third fundamental trait of a profession: the maintenance of monopolistic barriers by the profession's regulatory body (Johnson, 2008).

The power perspective brought a necessary dose of skepticism to the uncritical trait-based justification of the professions' privileged status (Greenwood, 2008). However, its relatively narrow ideological focus limited the scope and efficacy of its arguments. It debunked the concept of ...