Vilfredo Pareto - The Rise of Professionalism

Originally published in 1977 by the University of California Press.

Published 2013 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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New material this edition copyright 2013 by Taylor & Francis.

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2011053485

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Larson, Magali Sarfatti.

The rise of professionalism : monopolies of competence and sheltered markets / Magali Sarfatti Larson; with a new introduction by the author.

p. cm.

Originally published in 1977 by University of California Press.

ISBN 978-1-4128-4777-3

1. Professions--Social aspects--United States. 2. Professional socialization. I. Title.

HT687.L37 2012

305.5530973--dc23

2011053485

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-4777-3 (pbk)

This book grew out of my doctoral dissertation; I therefore wish to express my gratitude to the National Science Foundation and to the Danforth Foundation for their support while I was working on my thesis. The Kent Fellowship which the Danforth Foundation awarded me from 1972 to 1974 meant much more to me than just financial help.

Sentimental acknowledgments are extremely gratifying for an author, but the reader seldom finds them interesting. The following people will know with how much sentiment I wish to thank them: they are, first of all, my teachers at the University of California, Berkeley: Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Robert Blauner, W. R. Ellis, and Neil Smelser. One of my first and finest teachers, Kalman H. Silvert, died an untimely death as I was finishing this writing. I would have anxiously awaited his response to this work; now, I can only record my intellectual debt and my admiration. Among the many friends and colleagues who endlessly listened, read, suggested, and edited were Andrew Scull, Fred Block, and Charles D. Kaplan, whose intellectual support went far beyond the writing of this book; and also Jeffrey Escoffier, Ann Beuf, Carole Joffe, Arlene K. Daniels, Ted Reed and my students in the seminar on the sociology of professions at the University of Pennsylvania. My debt with Richard Fitzgerald is greatest in regard to the American chapters. Ronald Greles acute comments on the first draft and his broad historical knowledge helped me greatly, as did Alain Touraines incisive reading. Last but not least, I wish to thank my editors at the University of California Press, Grant Barnes and Gene Tanke for their help and support, as well as Mrs. Miranda Reinis, for her perfect and patient typing.

My son Antonio was born a few months before I started writing this book. Naturally, he did all that was in his power to prevent me from doing so. I should therefore thank, most of all, the people who helped me with such devotion and good grace to hold Antonio in check. My indebtedness to my parents and to my husband, for this as well as everything else, is of the kind that cannot even begin to be stated here.

M.S.L.

My interest in the professions was initially awakened by practical experiences. During a strike of college teachers in the sixties, the accusation was heard that these professors were behaving like longshoremen. Later, I was told by the organizers of a union of employed architects in the San Francisco Bay Area that most of their potential members resisted unionization, as something unprofessional. Somehow, architectural employees, most of whom can be laid off without prior notice from one day to the next and are paid hourly wages often lower than those of semiskilled laborers in construction unions, believed that unionization would further reduce their dignity and their prospects as working people. I began asking myself, whats in a name? What made professors and architectsnot to mention physicians, lawyers, and engineersfeel that the tactics and strategy of the industrial working class would deprive them of a cherished identity? What is there, in the attributes of a profession, that compensates for subordination, individual powerlessness, and often low pay?

In most cases, social scientists provide an unequivocal answer: professions are occupations with special power and prestige. Society grants these rewards because professions have special competence in esoteric bodies of knowledge linked to central needs and values of the social system, and because professions are devoted to the service of the public, above and beyond material incentives.

The list of specific attributes which compose the ideal-type of profession may vary, but there is substantial agreement about its general dimensions.

These communities are concretely identified by typical organizations and institutional patterns: professional associations, professional schools, and self-administered codes of ethics. It is not clear how much community would exist without these institutional supports; yet these supports are features that occupations which aspire to the privileges of professional status can imitate, without possessing the cognitive and normative justifications of real professions.

In fact, the professional phenomenon does not have clear boundaries. Either its dimensions are devoid of a clear empirical referent, or its attributes are so concrete that occupational groups trying to upgrade their status can copy them with relative ease. For instance, it is often emphasized that professional training must be prolonged, specialized, and have a theoretical base. Yet, as Eliot Freidson ironically points out, it is never stated how long; how theoretical, or how specialized training must be in order to qualify, since all formal training takes some time, is somewhat specialized, and involves some attempt at generalization. Such rankings reflect synthetic evaluations, which fact makes it impossible to ascertain the weight assigned to the professional characteristics of competence and disinterestedness in such judgments; prestige may well be accorded on grounds that have nothing to do with the professions distinctiveness, such as the high income and upper-middle-class status of many professionals.

Profession appears to be one of the many natural concepts, fraught with ideology, that social science abstracts from everyday life. The most common ideal-type of profession combines heterogeneous elements and links them by implicit though untested propositionssuch as the proposition that prestige and autonomy flow naturally from the cognitive and normative bases of professional work. Many elements of the definition reproduce the institutional means and the sequence by which the older professions gained their special status. Others do not seem to take notice of empirical evidence or even of common knowledge about the professions; for instance, the notion of professions as communities does not fit very well with the wide discrepancies of status and rewards which we know exist within any profession. It is also somewhat disturbing to note that competence and the service ideal play as central a role in the sociological ideal-type as they do in the self-justification of professional privilege.