Search

Received wisdom in the sociology of professions employs two approaches, a narrow socio-economic approach (largely in the Anglo-American world) and a much broader cultural and social-psychological approach (largely on the Continent). Both approaches agree on two points. First, professions cannot be distinguished at a conceptual level from other occupations. Second, whatever consequences either successful or failed professionalism introduces into civil society or state administration are confined to the occupational order and stratification system. They do not and cannot affect the direction of social change. The alternative approach outlined and discussed here is structural and institutional. With this approach we distinguish professions proper analytically from other occupations and we identify consequences of professionalism proper that uniquely reflect or anticipate notable shifts in the direction of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One consensus in the sociology and history of professions is that law, not medicine, pioneered the first professionalism projects in Western history. English law is typically cited as the exemplar. We challenge this consensus by demonstrating that visual academies, led by the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture of Paris, preceded along a professionalism project centuries in advance of English law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual academies were unique social formations in the ancien régime, so distinctive that they are best studied as prototype professions. Alone among academies, they were responsible for offering instruction. Alone among educational institutions, they linked liberal instruction to occupational practice. Alone among `learned' occupations, they accommodated an irreducible manual component. The visual Académie in Paris in particular established literally the first `graduate school' in any field of activity and admitted students on the basis of anonymously scored student competitions. Equivalent activities will not begin to emerge in medicine or law until the mid-l9th century. Our historical case, in short, calls into question the received orthodoxy regarding the time and place of the first professionalism projects. Instead of focusing on 19th-century Britain, we are now considering mid-l7th-century France and thereby preparing the way for a new start in the sociology of professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continental sociologists did not contribute to the sociology of professions until the 1980s in part because no continental language developed indigenously a synonym for profession. Today, however, some continental sociologists are contributing to this literature, but they are inadvertently recapitulating within it the theories and concepts that for decades were applied to the middle classes more generally. This article explores why these theories and concepts revolve around cultural and social psychological variables, and why they neglect invariant structural qualities. The article concludes by proposing schematically a structural and institutional turn in the study of professions that distinguishes professions from middle-class occupations and reveals the consequences that professions uniquely introduced into civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]