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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Serie: ISTE Consignment
- Sprache: Englisch
Professionalization has become a given in the worlds of work and education. For a wide variety of professions, public and private organizations and training and further education courses, professionalization is an inescapable reality. However, it takes on diverse, even contradictory meanings, according to what it represents: a managerial imperative imposed by public or managerial policies, or a set of goals defined by an ideal of service or quality of work.
The purpose of
Encyclopedia of Professionalization is to discuss the current challenges facing professionalization and, by exploring major research traditions, to clarify the meanings associated with this concept and the various phenomena it encompasses.
Three major notions of professionalization are examined: the manufacturing of professions in pursuit of autonomy, the rise of professionalisms embodying notions of a job well done, and the construction of renewed professionalities at the very heart of work situations and training systems.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
PART 1: Professionalization, the Manufacturing of Professions
1 Professionalization, Practical Wisdom and Vulnerabilities
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Classic professionalization theories
1.3. The protection of professions with prudential practice
1.4. Objectivity, professionalism metamorphoses and vulnerabilities
1.5. Conclusion
1.6. References
2 Professionalization: The Mystery of Boundaries
2.1. Professionalization as the selection of professions
2.2. Professionalization as friction at the boundaries
2.3. Conclusion
2.4. References
PART 2: Professionalization, the Rise of Professionalisms
3 New Requirements and Standards at Work: Driving Forces and Limitations to the Recomposition of Professional Autonomy and Responsibility
3.1. Greater autonomy in the face of increasing work requirements?
3.2. Project, network and trust: new labor standards?
3.3. Professionalization or standardization? New forms of work standardization
3.4. New Public Management: work standardization for public employees?
3.5. Experimenting with new forms of labor governance
3.6. Conclusion
3.7. References
4 Struggles Over the Definition of a “Job Well Done”
4.1. The definition of a job well done, the cornerstone of professionalism
4.2. A job well done, determined by the professionals themselves
4.3. When the definition of a job well done escapes professionals
4.4. Struggles around the definition of a job well done
4.5. Conclusion
4.6. References
5 Professionalization as an Object of Tensions between Institutional, Collective and Individual Logics
5.1. The ambiguous status of the term professionalization: between camouflage and the revelation of tensions between and within the configurations of actors
5.2. Professionalization as a configuration of actors engaged in interdependent and tensional dynamics: illustration of configurations of actors in tension around a professionalization scheme
5.3. Conflicting relationships and reconfigurations of variable actors around the professionalization scheme
5.4. Professionalization as the production of skills and of professional identities
5.5. Conclusion
5.6. References
PART 3: Professionalization, the Construction of Professionalities
6 Apprenticeship in Education and in Training: Foundation for Adult Training, Professionalization Analyzer of Educational Paths and Pedagogic Figure
6.1. Contexts and conditions for the emergence of apprenticeship programs in education and in training
6.2. The apprenticeship pedagogy(ies): foundations, conceptions and uses
6.3. Conclusion: apprenticeship, stage director of professionalization paths and critical friend of life paths
6.4. References
7 The Relationships Between Professionalization and the Work Situation: Professional Challenges and Social Relationships
7.1. The social order at the center
7.2. The individual at the center
7.3. Activity at the center
15
7.4. Conclusion
7.5. References
8 Learning in the Workplace: Recurrent and Emerging Conceptions and Practices
8.1. Purposes of learning through work
8.2. Utilizing, enriching and augmenting workplace learning experiences
8.3. Learning through occupational practice
8.4. Supporting, augmenting and guiding learning at work
8.5. Promoting and engaging workers’ personal epistemologies
8.6. Recurrent and emerging conceptions and practices: learning through work
8.7. References
9 The Activity Analysis Approach in Education and Training Sciences: Challenges, Principles and Perspectives
9.1. The intelligibility of relationships between work and learning: a scientific and praxeological challenge
9.2. The reference in education and training sciences to different theoretical trends or approaches which study the way in which humans act, learn and transform themselves by producing
9.3. Principles which structure and guide research work in education and training sciences
9.4. A micrological mode observation and analysis of human activities in a situation of production of goods and/or services
9.5. Conclusion
9.6. References
10 Professionalism and the Auto/Biographical Imagination
10.1. Introduction: auto/biography and professionalism
10.2. The central role of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA)
10.3. A case in point
10.4. Doing “educational biography”
10.5. More Canterbury tales
10.6. Narrative competence
10.7. Travelling south
10.8. Imagining the future
10.9. Conclusion: a wider world, constraints and new opportunities
10.10. References
Conclusion: Manufacturing of Professions, Production of Professionalities and Rise of Professionalism: Interdependence and Reciprocal Transformations of Individuals, Collectives, Organizations and Environments
C.1. The study of the three professionalizations: different disciplinary spaces; meanings, challenges and modalities that stand out
C.2. Beyond the apparent “boundaries”, the observation of an overall movement reflecting an interdependence of professionalizations
C.3. In conclusion: some blind spots and future challenges regarding the study of professionalization
C.4. References
List of Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 3
Table 3.1. Various requirements that weigh down the pace of work
Table 3.2. Evolution of autonomy and leeway
Chapter 5
Table 5.1. Professionalization levels and their uses
Conclusion
Table C.1. Different disciplinary spaces, meanings, challenges and modalities
Table C.2. Professionalization paths and the associated work and/or training s...
List of Illustrations
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1. Professionalization polygon.
Conclusion
Figure C.1. Links between the projects of organizations, the projects of colle...
Figure C.2. Close links and reciprocal transformations between environments, o...
Figure C.3. Transformations which take place in multiple temporalities.
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion: Manufacturing of Professions, Production of Professionalities and Rise of Professionalism: Interdependence and Reciprocal Transformations of Individuals, Collectives, Organizations and Environments
List of Authors
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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SCIENCES
Education and Training, Field Director – Jean-Marc Labat
Education and Society,Subject Heads – Géraldine Farges and Xavier Pons
Encyclopedia of Professionalization
Organization of Professions, Production of Professionalities and Growth of Professionalism
Coordinated by
Didier Demazière
Richard Wittorski
First published 2024 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030USA
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© ISTE Ltd 2024The rights of Didier Demazière and Richard Wittorski to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024943305
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 978-1-78945-183-2
ERC code:SH3 The Social World and Its Diversity SH3_8 Social policies, welfare, work and employment SH3_11 Social aspects of teaching and learning, curriculum studies, education and educational policies
Introduction
Didier DEMAZIÈRE1 and Richard WITTORSKI2
1CSO, CNRS, Sciences Po, Paris, France
2CIRNEF Laboratory, University of Rouen, France
Professionalization is a concept with a prominent presence in the fields of education, training and work, as well as in public and private organizations. Many observers agree that the term has become polysemous, as its uses dramatically vary depending on the actors using it and their various reasons: to have professional experience recognized, to adapt training to the productive system, to team up in peer communities to improve their status, to invite people to engage in new forms of work, etc. In addition, polysemy around this topic has given rise to debates and tensions as to the different interests invested in the term’s use.
Briefly stated, within organizations, professionalization can denote the appearance of new work expectations: in training spaces, it can translate learning processes and the construction of knowledge and skills (a term often used when we talk about professionalization); in public policies, it can express intentions for reforms and the establishment of new forms of governance; it can also be used by employees and professional groups or unions to foster the recognition of activities, professions, statuses, etc.
The notion of professionalization may alternately respond to a quest on the part of employees and “tradespeople” for further recognition or to the rise in demands addressed to employees or professionals by organizations, clienteles or users around efficiency challenges or work quality. These two movements do not necessarily converge, and rarely do they reflect the same expectations or practices. Lexical consensus quickly gives way to strong semantic dissent leading to discrepancies, misunderstandings and even tensions.
Now we observe that professionalization can refer to various phenomena. As a result, we may notice a plethora of analytical grids across research papers whose unity is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp. Therefore, professionalization is located at the crossroads of multiple disciplinary perspectives: the educational sciences, labor sciences, organizational sciences and political sciences. From a historic viewpoint, the concept of professionalization was first theoretically developed by sociology in English-speaking countries. This discipline asserted itself with the booming of the “sociology of professions” specialization, which studies the emergence and constitution of professional groups defending their position in the division of labor. In broad terms, the sociology of professions in English-speaking countries gradually evolved after the beginning of the 20th century. Sometimes taking a stand in the field of social and political debates, it intended to report on the way in which groups of individuals sharing the same activities organized themselves in free market contexts in view of obtaining an authorization to exercise, conquer a monopoly of exercise and regulate the professional territory conquered. A heated debate quickly crossed this field opposing functionalists to interactionists, while the former sought to elucidate the distinctive traits enabling and legitimizing the access to the status of profession (as opposed to the common condition of occupation), the latter rejected said distinction and attempted to explain why certain activities manage to be recognized as professions, arguing for the contingent nature of the difference. Other Weberian, neo-Weberian and Marxist approaches later rekindled this debate.
In countries with strong state presence and central regulation of activities (mainly the old continent countries), the collective challenges are not the same and the recognition dynamics of professional activities do not engage the same logics, nor do they follow the same avenues. Work is being carried out in Europe, on the one hand, in reaction to the approaches prevailing in English-speaking countries – deemed poorly valid for characterizing the vast majority of professional activities which do not fall within liberal professions – and, on the other hand, in continuity with an interactionist perspective by focusing on the internal and external dynamics of professional groups, or by developing a “conflictualist” approach to relationships between professional groups and institutions or organizations. In the wider field of sociology of work, notably in France, Belgium, etc., numerous “critical” papers have studied the development and use of the professionalization glossary by companies (the terms skill, performance, autonomy, responsibility, etc.) in connection with organization, regulation and work assessment challenges. Some have insisted on the idea that professionalization joins a growing call for skills to meet new work standards. The challenges could involve “making people swallow the pill of flexibility”. Permanent adaptability could lead to the individualization of assessment, tightening control over workers and reducing their autonomy at work. From this point of view, professionalization is also perceived as being at the service of committing employees to more flexible work contexts and making greater use of people’s subjective resources.
Recently, the field of training has also adopted the term, due to its massive introduction since the end of the 1990s into international, European and national discourses and texts governing professional training, whether initial or ongoing. Essentially, the work carried out there concerns the analysis of trends in the joint evolution of work and training, and the identification of new work-training articulation logics in so-called “professionalizing training” approaches, more closely related to changes in work and supposed to prepare the trainee for more targeted functions.
As we can see, the concept of professionalization has been subject to fragmented theoretical development, in different scientific fields at the origin of varied research traditions. However, work challenges, wider political and social challenges, challenges raised by professional groups and training challenges are closely intertwined when discussing professionalization.
To speak of professionalization in the field of training necessarily implies evoking the transformations of work and broader environments at the same time, seeking to understand the reciprocal transformations of individuals, collectives, organizations and environments. The general hypothesis could be the following: training and learning processes, as well as their transformations, can only be understood located in “space-time” (socio-political, organizational and collective environments (professional groups and local micro-collectives), individuals), themselves characterized by reciprocal transformations encouraged by inseparable challenges in the continuous change of organizations, collectives and individuals. By extension, in order to understand these dynamics, it is necessary to cross-research traditions that are rarely linked: for example, those centered on the transformations of legal regulations, the dynamics of organizations, the collective of workers, activity analyses, the metamorphosis of knowledge, the construction of the individuals’ experience and career path, the configuration of individual and collective identities, etc.
The ambition of this encyclopedic volume is to bring together and stimulate the dialogue between the available research papers addressing this concept in various fields. In fact, this insight cannot forgo the different “theoretical lenses” and the knowledge they produce because, as we mentioned earlier, the dynamics of professionalization are inseparable from ampler organizational, sociopolitical and collective dynamics. Furthermore, the knowledge produced by these approaches is today difficult to gather because it is dispersed across various scientific fields and traditions: the sociology of professions, work analysis (sociology of work and psycho-sociology of work), adult education and training, management sciences and political sciences, to mention the most important ones. As a corollary, this dispersion leads to low visibility and a difficulty for illuminating the field of professionalization. This ambition is reinforced by the idea that it is necessary to shed light on the challenges of professionalization for education and training by relating them to political and social challenges, organizational challenges, collective and individual challenges.
To satisfy these intentions, this encyclopedic volume will be organized into three parts which correspond to three main orientations or social significations of professionalization, supplemented in each case by texts penned by one or more specialists in the area concerned.
The first part will address the issue of professionalization probably in its oldest sense: the emergence, the constitution, the quest for recognition and the hoped for or effective institutionalization of professions. The challenge is to empirically grasp and theoretically model the professionalization paths of professional groups, of workers carrying out a given activity, seeking to have it recognized and valued, to gain autonomy in the regulation of their work with regard to their environment (clientele, organizations), or even to establish a monopoly of exercise ensuring them protection against competition from other professionals: which groups succeed in achieving this and how? What are the paths to professionalization? How can we account for and explain the considerable inequalities in this area? Showing that the sociologists of professions and those of work have provided divergent answers to these questions, two texts explore the concept of professionalization as “the manufacturing of professions”. Florent Champy will explore the potential of a “prudentialist” theory of professionalization, showing that it informs the historical process of protection of certain activities and sheds light on contemporary managerial threats risking to degrade the services provided by these professions. Didier Demazière will favor the prism of the boundaries dynamics delimiting professional groups, arguing that such boundaries are invariably shifting and unstable because professionalization is always uncertain, so that it can designate the division of labor and the recomposition of activities, which comes down to stating that professional groups are professionalizations.
In the second part, professionalization will be studied as the “ascent of professionalism”, that is to say, as the new requirements at work, the recent standards to define and supervise it, and which contribute to recognizing the employee as a professional (or not). New ways of defining, regulating and evaluating work are emerging, often associated with a new rhetoric of quality and efficiency, which ultimately raises the question as to who “is in control”: the professionals or the organizations, the customers or the institutions which finance the activity and which then impose them on the professionals? Or are they the subject of negotiation, and if so, between which actors and with what outcomes? This part will be devoted to the second meaning of the term professionalization, which will be discussed in three texts: firstly, Arnaud Mias will address the reasons and forms underlying the emergence of new requirements at work. Valérie Boussard will then discuss the way in which these new requirements bring to the forefront new conceptions of a job well done, sometimes in tension with those held by professionals. Mokhtar Kaddouri will finally show that professionalization is part of a debate between organizational, collective and individual projects, more lively than ever when new requirements are imposed on professionals.
In the third part, professionalization will be discussed from the perspective of the “production of professionalities”, in other words, the preparation of future professionals or the further development of “existing” professionals not only through training but also through work, activity and the construction of experience. The goal is to study professionalization from the angle of the acquisition and development of expertise and knowledge specific to particular areas of intervention. In this sense, professionalization often (but not only) involves education and training systems, as well as broader work and social life experience. At this point, we can see that social expectations enlarged after the international and European provisions of the late 1990s, which required education and training systems to further professionalize their supply. The texts by Philippe Maubant, Stephen Billett, Sandra Enlart, Lindon West and Joris Thiévenaz will show that the production of professionalities goes far beyond the recourse to the “typical” apprenticeship program (formation par alternance), often giving a preponderant place to the field of training in the organizational decisions of such schemes. The approach will diversify and become more complex with the need to acknowledge the learning nature of the professional activity itself (like on-the-job training actions developed in France), as well as the work contexts/environments, which all lead to the production of professionalities also as a form of professional socialization.
In a final text, Richard Wittorski will discuss the hypothesis that the three meanings of professionalization which structure the encyclopedia, far from being separated and functioning autonomously, are in reality strongly articulated, revealing particular configurations, that is to say, close interdependence systems. He will develop the idea that professionalization points to “space-time” dimensions or singular configurations (forms) articulating (putting into debate-tension, with different combinations) the projects of professional groups, organizations and individuals in (socio-politico-economic) environments which have their own characteristics.
PART 1Professionalization, the Manufacturing of Professions
1Professionalization, Practical Wisdom and Vulnerabilities
Florent CHAMPY
LISST, CNRS, University of Toulouse, France
1.1. Introduction
Professionalization – to be understood as achieving a status protecting certain activities from competition in markets and from power in organizations – is a central theme in the sociology of professions1. It is also a process which mainly took place from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. The history of medicine is emblematic of this process. How can we account for the statuses granted to certain professions? Sociologists have offered contradictory answers to this question, and even the most outstanding among them (those provided by functionalists, interactionists and Andrew Abbott) have led to aporias.
The Aristotelian concept of phronesis enables us to overcome these difficulties. Translated into English as “practical wisdom”, it denotes a mode of thinking required for acting in situations of irreducible uncertainty (Aubenque 1963; Broadie 1991). Practical wisdom both explains the fragility of protected professions (which are prudential2 activities), and the challenges of not letting untrained persons replace professionals at work. It accounts for the fact that medicine (which philosophers considered to be the prudential activity par excellence) is the model for professionalization and the activity that has occupied sociologists to the largest extent. Briefly stated, a prudentialist theory of professionalization sheds light on the forms and consequences of recent managerial offensives to reduce the autonomy or advantages of such professions. It helps us to understand the fragility of activities especially targeted by a mode of thinking, dominant in society, which defies the requirements of practical wisdom.
To show this, we will examine the explanations that the three aforementioned trends have provided for professionalization and their limitations. We will then explore the arguments in favor of a prudentialist theory of professionalization, principally relying on an analysis of the dominant conceptions of professionalism at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, when most professionalization took place. Finally, we will discuss a more recent past, marked by the hold of managerial logic on professional working environments to show that the pressures the prudential professions3 are confronted with run contrary to the value of practical wisdom in the times of professionalization.
1.2. Classic professionalization theories
1.2.1. The functionalist theory
The theme of professionalization is consubstantial with the emergence of the functionalist sociology of professions. Indeed, the functionalists distinguished between professions and occupations, explaining their differences within the framework of a theory of professionalization, showing what distinctive features had permitted certain activities to access the status of a profession, the advantages they derived from it and what social functions were performed by the protection that this professionalization process offered them. The functionalists worked on this theme from the beginning of the century until the end of the 1960s. As early as 1915, in a conference where he spoke about social work, Abraham Flexner presented the recourse to scientific knowledge and the tendency to self-organization as two features of professions. With slight variations, these two themes remained present throughout the half-century when functionalist theories dominated (Champy 2012).
The great functionalist theorist of professions was Talcott Parsons, who conceived society as a living organism within which professions constitute an organ (Parsons 1939, pp. 56–58). His sociology aimed to show that this organ is adapted to its function: by seeking to rationally cope with a series of social problems, professions contribute to the proper functioning of society, whereby professionalization becomes an element within a rationalization process. Parsons reflected upon professions as a whole, inspired by the case of medicine. By taking care of disease, medicine contributes to the functioning of the economic system. It is for this reason that the quality of the patient–doctor relationship has to be protected. Doctors benefit from significant protection in the form of a monopoly of practice, the control of teaching by professionals and strong autonomy in relation to non-doctors (only a doctor can legitimately judge the validity of a medical decision). While monopoly protects against competition in the labor market, autonomy prevents interference in organizations: professional logic is deployed in articulation/ competition with the market and the organizational logics of economic life.
According to Parsons, two elements explained these forms of protection. To begin with, only doctors can treat the sick because they have mastered the high-level scientific knowledge indispensable for care: a certain autonomy must be granted to them. The emergence of professions is inseparable from the development of universities as a place of research and training in science for future professionals, as these professions constitute the vector for the application of science to concrete problems4. This means that scientific knowledge supports the instrumental rationality of professions. Furthermore, the doctors’ work is defined and supervised by the profession, in such a way that doctors use the autonomy conferred on them in the patient’s interest. This normative framework is inscribed in the “role” of the doctor, and the “Order” as an institution ensures its respect. In other words, the profession’s collective autonomy is more relevant than that of each doctor.
Primarily inspired in the case of medicine, the Parsonian theory was then softened to account for the professionalization process in law and engineering (Parsons 1968, pp. 536–546), with variations depending on activities and countries (the United States, United Kingdom and continental European countries). Nuancing his 1939 reflections, Parsons then placed less emphasis on the strength of the link between the development of universities and professionalization: the case of engineering showed that professionalization could also be achieved based on practical knowledge, as an extension of craftsmanship (a consideration which weakened his initial theory). Furthermore, even for medicine, the explanation of protection via scientific knowledge was not thoroughly convincing. As we will come back to later, the scientific bases of medicine were still almost non-existent in the second half of the 19th century, when its professionalization process began. Robert Merton, another functionalist, emphasized the lack of seriousness of medical education in the 19th century (Merton 1957).
At length, in 1964, Wilensky published an article where he remarked that more and more occupations were trying to attain a professional status, thus translating the success of the ideas of professionalism/professionalization in the world of work. Wilensky was the last notable functionalist working on professions as he stuck to the differentiation between occupations and professions: while many activities aspired to professionalization, few managed to reach the type of protection that the functionalists sought to explain. According to Wilensky, the service activities which emerged at that moment were not to be confused with professions, because they did not share their distinctive features. His article therefore showed how a functionalist sociologist sought to take into consideration the social developments of their time. However, above all, it represented an attempt to respond to the interactionists, who had already begun to draw radical conclusions from general aspirations for the status of a profession, by denouncing the distinction between professions and occupations, at the cost of new difficulties for the theory of professionalization.
1.2.2. The interactionist critique
From the 1950s, sociologists gathered in Chicago, notably around the figure of Everett Hughes, and founded a new school of thought. Among this group, Anselm Strauss, Howard Becker and Eliot Freidson, along with Hughes himself, made an important contribution to the sociology of work and professions based on a virulent critique of functionalism which was dominant at the time. At the end of the 1960s, their approach prevailed. While medicine continued to play a large part in their work, the group’s main innovation was to open up the sociology of professions to the study of a wide variety of occupations, which they considered to be just as interesting as professionalized professions:
Specifically we need to rid ourselves of any concepts which keep us from seeing that the essential problems of men at work are the same whether they do their work in the laboratories of some famous institution or in the messiest vat room of a pickle factory. […] perhaps there is as much to be learned about the high-prestige occupations by applying to them the concepts which naturally come to mind for study of people in the most lowly kinds of work as there is to be learned by applying to other occupations the conceptions developed in connection with the highly valued professions. […] It is not that it puts one in the position to debunk [them], but simply that processes which are hidden in other occupations come more readily to view in these lowly ones (Hughes 1984, pp. 342–343).
We thus see that the disinterestedness of doctors is more of an ideology than a reality, whereas the difficulty of the problems solved by plumbers makes us aware of their high competence level. In a nutshell, for Hughes, the lack of distinction between professions and occupations was a methodological choice. Any ontological affirmation was still absent, though. On the contrary, Becker asserted that there is no difference between professions and occupations. According to him, the concept of profession is merely a “folk concept” (Becker 1962).
This methodological (and then conceptual) innovation had a major consequence on the study of professionalization. If there is no difference between professions and occupations, it is futile to try to explain why certain activities have attained the status of profession, while others have not. Interactionists either avoided the question altogether (Hughes’s position), or they presented professional status as the contingent result of struggles due to the advantages it provides (ibid.). In both cases, they dismissed any search for the bases of the distinction between professions and other occupations. However, by asserting that professions are only activities that have had better fortune than others in a competition, Becker actually developed a theory of professionalization which must be examined as such. In fact, this position – which has generated an extensive legacy, especially in the French sociology of professional groups – is not tenable.
By neglecting to explain why certain activities have managed to benefit from a professionalization process, while others have not, and simply by relying on ad hoc historical explanations, Becker avoided the pitfall of the functionalist theory: its difficulty in stabilizing the features that explain why an activity has reached the status of a profession, and in formalizing a typically relevant process in the face of the diversity of concrete historical processes. However, the cost was high. Not only did invoking chance or luck amount to purely and simply renouncing any explanation of the status granted to certain activities, but this assumption on chance had been invalidated by the facts, as it failed to account for a strong regularity: the same activities were protected in various countries. Despite variations, medicine is protected in all countries with a university system and a regulatory state, while other activities, like artisanal or commercial activities, are not protected anywhere. This regularity would be compatible with a chance-based explanation only if the professionalization process had taken place within a supranational framework, leading to the same results in different countries. However, this is not the case. Historians of professions agree on the importance of national frameworks to account for the progress and results of these processes (Malatesta 2006). In fact, these dissociated processes produce a result that is remarkably similar from one country to another. In any case, a theory of professionalization cannot avoid explaining this regularity.
The criticism of the implicit Beckerian theory of professionalization can also be formulated from within interactionism itself. In point of fact, Becker’s ontological posture is not representative of this entire trend. Similarly to the functionalists before them, Strauss and Freidson placed medicine at the heart of their research and found unique features in it that they insisted upon, starting from the 1980s. Strauss then wrote:
There are two striking features of health work shared only with certain other kinds of work. One consists of the unexpected and often difficult to control contingencies stemming not only from the illness itself, but also from a host of work and organizational sources as well as from biographical and life-style sources pertaining to patients, kin, and staff members themselves. A second and crucial feature of health work is that it is ‘people work’. […] taken together, both features insure that trajectory work harbors the potential for being complex and often highly problematic (Strauss et al. 1985, p. 9).
As for Freidson (1970, 1986), he was critical of professions, studying the misuses of professional power first in medicine, and then more generally. He showed that the scientific knowledge that doctors and members of the other professions invoke to justify their status and autonomy poorly reflects the reality of their activity, where many decisions lack a solid scientific basis, and may therefore appear arbitrary. This criticism is pertinent as it addresses a key theme both for professional rhetoric and functionalist theory: the ability of professionals to base what they do on fully objective reasons. However, Freidson never completely denied the scientific grounds of certain activities: for him, it was the gaps, that is to say, the effective application of knowledge, which posed a problem. Moreover, his later works pleaded for the defense of the professional model against the two other logics, market logic and organization logic (Freidson 1994, 2001), revealing his discomfort with the assertion of indistinctness between professions and occupations. His last works did not provide an original definition of professionalism that would enable us to avoid the pitfalls of functionalism. The quote by Strauss hints at a solution, suggesting that work is less objective than professionals claim and needs to be protected precisely because the complexity of situations invalidates the application of scientific knowledge. Andrew Abbott’s theory is a more elaborate outline of this solution.
1.2.3. Andrew Abbott’s theory
The last major theoretical work on professions is that by Abbott (1988), who provided an extremely stimulating theory of professionalization, acknowledging both the contributions of interactionism and those of functionalism. From the interactionists, Abbott took up the criticism of the “distinctive features” approach to professionalization, which he rightly criticized for having oversimplified reality. In contrast to the approach trying to update a professionalization model that was valid everywhere, Abbott claimed to be attentive to the diversity of concrete processes, recognizing within them a large part of contingency. Furthermore, he placed the concrete struggles between the actors and the division of labor at the heart of his theory: what professions are depends less on the adaptation of an organ to a function (as stated by the functionalists), than on their construction through multiple interactions inevitably involving an element of contingency. Finally, as the interactionists did, he studied more numerous and more diverse activities than those the functionalists were interested in. For these reasons, and also no doubt because by imposing its own research standards, interactionism established itself as a prism for reading other works, Abbott is often read as an interactionist, but this reading is incomplete, and the interest of his work also lies in the way in which he avoids the aporias of the interactionist perspective, notably the Beckerian perspective. Three points clearly differentiate him from the interactionists and bring him closer to the functionalists. First of all, Abbott again took up a question close to the functionalists’ questions on professionalization, as he sought to discover how professions manage to obtain a lasting protection of their jurisdiction: behind the games of the actors, stability was of great interest to this author. Moreover, he broke with the perspective inherited from Hughes, which was to study every activity in the same way. Instead, he became interested in particular types of professions, those “applying somewhat abstract knowledge to particular cases”5 (p. 8). Last, but not least, moving away from the idea of contingency that was dear to interactionists, he thoroughly explained the delimitation of jurisdictions and their protection through the concept of “efficacity”, which held a crucial place in his theory. This book aims to take up the interactionist heritage (with the actors, struggles, strategies, contingency and the collective work for constructing the meaning of the social world), while avoiding the radical relativist position which resulted from it and led to an aporia in the theory of professionalization.
How does Abbott manage to reconcile propositions which, in light of previous theories, seem contradictory? How can he speak both of the contingency of processes and the conformity of their results to efficiency requirements? The answer lies in the importance of temporalities in the struggle of profession members for certain jurisdictions, that is, to impose a relationship between a set of tasks and their profession. Abbott discerns between three arenas in which the efficiency of the response provided by a profession to a problem is recognized according to a very different temporality: the workplace, public opinion and the legal system (ibid., pp. 59–60). It is at the workplace that the division of labor adapts itself most quickly to efficiency requirements, because daily relationships prevent the lasting concealment of efficiency gaps between various solutions. When the members of an occupation in competition with others provide a more efficient solution to a problem, it will only take two or three years for this solution to be adopted. The image that professions give of their work to the lay public far from the workplace evolves at a slower pace: Abbott estimates the time it takes for this public to become aware of the change in the division of labor to be 10–20 years. Ultimately, the arena of the legislative or administrative system is even slower than that: it is only after 20–50 years that the administrative system formalizes any modification of the division of labor. The sluggishness of this process leaves room for power games, enabling some occupations to gain momentary advantages that the efficiency of their work does not justify: there is the place for the contingencies interactionists have insisted so much upon. However, according to Abbott, in the end efficiency is indeed the main factor which determines the sharing of jurisdictions, and which limits the contingent effects of the power games interactionists have emphasized6.
Neither functionalist nor interactionist, this sophisticated theory describes how the division of labor and its recognition enshrined in law for certain professions end up conforming to what allows for the greatest efficiency of work; it contains a blind spot that its sophistication has long hidden. By describing how professionals gradually obtain the recognition of a jurisdiction in three successive arenas, it does not explain why the public authorities grant formal protection of this jurisdiction to some of them. Professionalization therefore remains unexplained. Furthermore, this blind spot leads to a contradiction: if the struggles at the workplace cause a new, more effective division of labor within a short period of time, as soon as an innovation justifies replacing the old one, any obstacle to competition between the members of different occupations can hinder this adaptation, and thus the efficiency. By protecting a profession’s jurisdiction, public authorities freeze a division of labor that may not always be the most efficient. Not only does Abbott’s theory not explain this formal protection, but the existence of such protection seems to invalidate the theory, as it can hinder efficiency, which plays a key role in this theory.
One solution, which is simple but not obvious, is that what is fragile and threatened and, for one reason or another, precious is secured. In fact, Abbott’s book allows us to understand that professional jurisdictions are made vulnerable to competition by the difficulties that professional work faces, because it aims in “applying somewhat abstract knowledge to particular cases”. For the activities Abbott was interested in, the application of abstract knowledge presents the risk of not sufficiently taking into consideration the complexity and singularity of the concrete cases discussed, thus facilitating the criticism of the work and the competition’s claims over that market share. Besides, the very difficulties for applying knowledge to particular cases give reason to ensure that only qualified professionals can achieve this.
One of the originalities of this book is to propose an imposing theory of professional work, closely related to the theory of professionalization. According to Abbott, work has three dimensions: diagnosis, treatment and, between the two, inference, to which he devotes long passages. “Inference is undertaken when the connection between diagnosis and treatment is obscure” (ibid., p. 49). The inference chain serves to reflexively adapt the treatment to each unique case encountered. Indeed, this chain’s length holds a significant place in the theory. If this chain is too short, the treatment can be inferred from the diagnosis and the profession’s jurisdiction is fragile because this makes it easy for non-specialists to replace professionals: there is then a risk of an excessive mechanization of professional work. Conversely, if the chain is too long, the link between treatment and diagnosis becomes tenuous; therefore, the treatment seems purely subjective and no longer makes it possible to stabilize a jurisdiction. The activity then becomes vulnerable to interference from people outside the profession (e.g. the organization’s management) and to jurisdictional claims by competitors. In other words, inference is used to search for an answer that cannot be obtained from objective deduction, but which cannot be contingent, either. Also, the jurisdiction can only be protected, provided that the work presents these qualities: it is not mechanical, but does not appear as totally contingent. Now these are precisely the qualities of practical wisdom, in the philosophical sense. Let us tackle that question.
1.3. The protection of professions with prudential practice
1.3.1. The fragilities of practical wisdom and the theory of professionalization
While the fragilities of practical wisdom seem to be able to justify the jurisdiction of prudential professions being formally protected, this is not the case for activities where practical wisdom plays a lesser role. Absent from Abbott’s theory, this philosophical concept allows us to reflect upon this dead angle and escape from the aporias inherited from functionalism and interactionism. Before delving into what supports this thesis, let us explore what prudential professions are.
Practical wisdom is a mode of thinking that guides action in situations whose singularity and complexity entail irreducible uncertainty (Aubenque 1963). It is also a virtue, in that it aims to avoid the harm which could befall others if such uncertainty was ignored. Ultimately, this concept designates the dispositions and the aptitudes required to understand situations in which the mechanical application of abstract rules, formalized procedures, scientific knowledge or routines may lead to errors. On the contrary, particular attention to the concrete characteristics of each situation is required7.
Medicine (which is the activity most studied by functionalists and interactionists) is (also) the prudential activity par excellence, and often taken as an example by Aristotle and his main commentators (ibid.; Ricoeur 2001), as it deals with the individuality of patients and the complexity of the human body and psyche. The uncertainty with regard to the diagnosis and the efficiency of treatments illustrates the general features of prudential activities very well. However, many other activities also encompass a significant prudential dimension. Other health care professions, those relating to social work, architecture, design, industrial project management, teaching, research, justice, policing, diplomacy, the conduct of war and more generally government and finance, are also activities where practical wisdom is outstandingly useful – or at least could be, because it is conspicuously lacking in some of them, for example, in finance (Stiglitz 2003). While our intent is not to list them all, this enumeration does let us appreciate that these activities are ones that face one or more of the following four sources of uncertainty: the complexity and singularity of people (for caregivers, educators, social workers or even police officers), social scenarios (police officers, magistrates, researchers, diplomats) or complex objects (architects, researchers, project managers in industry), as well as the impossibility of directly knowing past events that could determine the course of action to be taken (police officers, magistrates), where once again, complexity prevents us from reaching certainty about the past based on what is known in the present.
In all these activities, prudent action is fragile for several reasons. While professional action based on scientific knowledge could invoke the strength of scientific certainty, practical wisdom is required when this knowledge leaves room for the subsistence of irreducible uncertainties. This is why prudent action is conjectural. Acting in a situation of uncertainty, the prudent person must sometimes rely on gambles which – even if counterbalanced by the experience of more or less similar cases – can turn out to be unfortunate. This requires knowing how to take the risk of making a mistake, and if necessary, showing boldness8. In addition, practical wisdom is deliberative, and these deliberations should often concern not only the activity’s means, but also its ends. Sometimes, the complexity of the cases treated prevents each of the activity’s ends from being satisfied, no matter how desirable these may be. For example, in medicine, we have to maximize the chances of a cure, while limiting the inconveniences and the risks of treatments. This gives prudent action a political dimension9. The conjectural and political dimensions of practical wisdom prevent us from finding all the answers to difficulties exclusively in the technique alone. They nuance these responses with an irreducible element of subjectivity, in contrast with the objectivity professed by the representatives of professions and by functionalists. The following will show the importance of this point.
The members of professions involving prudential practices are more exposed than others to having their decisions contested, not because they are bad professionals, but because they face complex and uncertain scenarios10. The public may then be tempted to withdraw their trust and turn to competitors, hence the particular vulnerability of prudential activities in terms of market competition. Furthermore, the arrival of poorly trained and inexperienced non-professionals on these markets would be all the more risky, given the fact that the cases treated are complex. This all explains why the public authorities have conferred protection against competition on certain activities, in exchange for guarantees regarding the activity’s training and control. Furthermore, not being able to sustain objectivity throughout their most difficult decisions makes professionals vulnerable to claims and interference from the non-professionals in organizations. Thus, the need for practical wisdom also accounts for the protection of professionals against external interference with their work11. The fragilities due to the high density of practical wisdom in certain activities therefore constitute a coherent explanation for the protection conferred within the framework of professionalization processes.
A second argument in support of this theory of professionalization is that activities protected from market competition and interference in organizations are activities requiring a significant amount of practical wisdom12. Conversely, certain activities with a high density of practical wisdom are not protected or are poorly protected, as in the case of social work13. However, the regularity is no less strong. It is perhaps even more so if we consider gradations. Even if the modalities differ from one country to another, medicine, the prudential activity par excellence, is also the most protected in all countries. Legal professions are quite comparable everywhere; architecture is protected in almost all industrialized countries, but less strongly. The question was even raised in the case of social work. Although a professionalization process was launched, it was unsuccessful (this aspect will be discussed later). On the other hand, many activities are not protected anywhere: blue-collar occupations; artisanal and commercial activities. The similarity of results produced within different national frameworks is sufficiently clear to show the need for having them addressed by a theory of professionalization.
The demonstration developed here also includes a third argument. In the period when members of certain activities struggled to obtain a professional status, the conception of professionalism underlying those struggles gave ample room to the idea of practical wisdom. Thus, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the descriptions of professional work in treatises and discourses borrowed heavily from the features of prudential activity. Let us consider the examples of medicine and social work.
1.3.2. The professionalization of American medicine
One of the criticisms formulated with regard to functionalism is that, especially in the United States, the profession’s recognition and the reorganization of medical studies preceded the advent of medical practice, largely based on the application of scientific knowledge. The historical fresco that Paul Starr dedicated to American medicine between the mid-18th and the end of the 20th century confirms this observation: the protection that medicine began to obtain at the end of the 19th century followed an aggiornamento of the activity which began with a movement toward the concrete and a great distrust of the metaphysical abstraction at the beginning of the century (Starr 1982, pp. 54–56). After the first decades of the century, greater emphasis was increasingly placed on clinical observation. In addition, this achievement of recognition was accompanied by therapeutic skepticism, which lasted until the end of the century. Modestly, medicine then became more interested in the social conditions of illness, which translated into a more holistic and less technical approach, as well as a more preventive than curative perspective. Starr also emphasized the importance given to experience and judgment in the representation of doctors. While medicine was discredited in the first half of the 19th century, the reconquest of authority and recognition followed a general attitude strongly evoking the characteristics of practical wisdom.
Two institutions played a prominent role in the educational innovations of the end of the 19th century: Johns Hopkins University and Oxford University, where two personalities had considerable influence: William Welch and William Osler. A novelty in the courses offered lay in the rapprochement with science. In order to break away from training based on “didactic lectures” (ibid., p. 114), universities equipped themselves with laboratories and scientific research became part of the curriculum for future doctors. However, the prevailing conception of medical work continued to give a significant role to empirics and experience. In 1893, a reform in the training at Johns Hopkins gave equal importance to scientific research and clinical instruction. Of the four years of training, two were devoted to on-the-job learning. Starr particularly insisted on this point: “though Hopkins accentuated science, it did not stand for a narrowly technical vision of medicine; this was the secret of its special éclat” (ibid., p. 116). Furthermore, Welch and Osler were both committed to ensuring that future doctors had a solid general culture, which should guide their judgment. This aspect highlights their awareness of the non-technical dimension of the activity. By insisting on experience and general knowledge, and even if they did not use the concept, Welch and Osler offered a portrayal of the prudent man.
1.3.3. Medicine and doctors according to Osler
A teacher at Johns Hopkins and then dean of the medical school at Oxford from 1905, Osler gave numerous addresses (to medical students, nurses and practitioners of medicine) on his conception of medicine14, which served as a reference not only in medicine, but also for other activities. The idea of practical wisdom permeated those addresses. The latter certainly included themes that the functionalist theory of professionalization had highlighted and even taken up at face value, such as “disinterestedness”: Osler presented the medical career as a vocation15, and balanced this life of sacrifice with the symbolic rewards associated with devotion to your neighbor. Likewise, science played a large part in his addresses, the clinician having to rely on the knowledge of three disciplines: chemistry, anatomy and physiology. At Johns Hopkins and then at Oxford, Osler effectively ensured that research laboratories in those disciplines were set up at the hospital and for training. He also insisted on the idea that science is not always enough to know what to do: “Is there then no science in medicine? Yes, but in parts only” (ibid., p. 36). “Wisdom” is required to make the right decisions and best care for the sick, several themes linking this conception of wisdom with the philosophical concept16.
Osler emphasized the uncertainty inherent in medical work. In 1889, he warned students at the University of Pennsylvania:
a distressing feature in the life which you are about to enter […] is the uncertainty which pertains not alone to our science and art, but to the very hopes and fears which make us men. In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable, and must be content with finding broken portions (p. 7).
The processes of disease are so complex that it is excessively difficult to search out the laws which control them (p. 128). Failures are therefore inevitable despite scientific progress (p. 8). Osler also addressed the difficult tensions to be overcome between competing goals of this multidimensional work, of which cure, education and prevention are the essential dimensions (p. 125). We understand that medicine is “one of the most difficult arts in the world to acquire” (pp. 23–24).
In front of the students, Osler extended the description of the activity with the presentation of his ideas on training and insisted as much on the moral qualities required for the doctor to face work-related difficulties as on the scientific knowledge required: equanimity, imperturbability, presence of mind, sound judgment, ability to make decisions, ability to control emotions and courage (pp. 132–133). Indeed, these qualities are those that philosophers attribute to prudent people (Aubenque 1963). In Osler’s addresses, difficulty, fallibility and humility clearly go hand in hand (p. 39): in the face of uncertainty, doctors must be aware of their own limitations and know how to learn from their mistakes (p. 40). Training is only longer and more difficult as the acquisition of abstract knowledge does not suffice in itself. It is a long process along which many experiences accumulate. The quality of the doctor depends as much (or even more) on a dearly acquired culture as on knowledge which can be formalized and systematically transmitted17. Osler therefore valued experience highly, upon which the ability to make relevant judgments is based. He spoke of the need for broad, thorough and prolonged clinical training and the importance of placing the student in close contact with the patient, diversifying the experiences encountered in training as much as possible (p. 145). Osler played a large role in the establishment and diffusion of the internship, which is emblematic of non-systematic training, by osmosis. However, a crucial quality for learning from experience (i.e. from success and failure) is modesty (pp. 130–131), a personal quality that cannot be transmitted. According to Osler, wisdom dies with the doctor (p. 140).
1.3.4. The “social case work” according to Mary Richmond18
Osler’s position is of even more historical interest as other professions have been inspired by his way of thinking on practice and training based on the requirement for adaptation to reality and the difficulties this entails. In response to a conference by Flexner, which rejected that social work had the qualities required to access the status of a profession, Mary Richmond published several works aimed at showing why this work is on the contrary highly qualified and can only be accomplished by professionals. One of these works is devoted to social diagnosis (Richmond 1917). We will focus here on another, more complete publication, because it is a later work and covers broader themes: Social Case Work, published in 1922. The title properly sums up its central argument: social work always deals with unique cases.
Passages devoted to the theme of professionalization show that the aim is to give social work access to the status of a profession. To do this, the book systematically addresses Richmond’s conception of social work; however, the presentation, albeit not systematic, reflects a conception of transmission where “a record [of former cases] […] can be unexcelled material for training other case workers” (p. 28): the presentation is built upon the examination of six cases in which individuals or families in difficulty received support. Inspired by these cases, Richmond develops themes similar to those of Osler. The idea of complexity comes up regularly to qualify both society and people, who must be assisted in finding a sense of their place and reintegration in society (p. 134). Richmond emphasizes the uncertainty of how this process would unfold (p. 106). She repeatedly mentions the need to individualize work19, to approach each person as wholly as possible, according to a holistic method combining economic, educational, health, psychological, social and cultural considerations (pp. 98–99) with deeper insights (p. 106), taking into consideration both social resources and the negative influences that the person’s environment may contain, and being quite prudent20 to pay attention to details and keep them in mind. This attention to detail, which excludes taking refuge in abstraction, is also the condition for a broader view: “the professional worker who, in any field, has imagination enough to deal effectively with concrete things, to scrutinize them and ‘put them together without abstraction’, is also likely to be the one who can be trusted to see their larger relations” (p. 243).
Social workers must be wary of anything that standardizes or mechanizes their activity: by visiting a family at any time, they avoid routines that are prejudicial to a proper understanding of the person and their environment (p. 75); they must avoid reducing people to categories (p. 155). The work takes time (pp. 125, 142), and carrying it out in depth requires strength (p. 155), especially since the practical working conditions do not help (pp. 217, 252). Thorough as it may be though, this work cannot remove all the uncertainties inherent in the support process21
