Ethics and Professionalism

4. Sociological Theories

04 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES My barber displays a plaque awarded to him by Redken Laboratories for training in the use and merchandising of its products. It bears the motto "Professionalism through Science and Education ." He is proud to be identified as a professional and Redken assures him that he is one. Clearly, however, his idea of professions is not what sociologists have in mind. They consider high status to be a mark of professions and barbering hardly enjoys that. Superficial agreement about the characteristics of professions among sociologists masks fundamental disagreements, as I shall show in succeeding chapters. These disagreements are reflected in the variable meanings of words in what I shall label "the professional terminology," such as 'profession,' 'professional,' 'professionalism,' 'professionalization,' and words used to define these.' This produces "semantic confusion," which Millerson sees as a serious obstacle to scientific inquiry.' The confusion is itself a social phenomenon that needs to be explained, but first it must be dispelled if we are to talk clearly about professions. Families and Family Terms Clapp lists 170 occupations that describe themselves as professions and affect trappings such as special insignia, codes of ethics, and associations organized on the professional model. Self-designated professionals range all of the way from accountants, electrical engineers, ophthalmologists, and zoologists to automotive service technicians, fire chiefs, football coaches, hypnotists, mid- 58 MODELS OF PROFESSIONS wives, purchasing agents, and technical writers.' Obviously, not everyone in the public accepts these designations or the same denotations for the terms. Variations in technical as well as popular usage has not made the terms of the professional terminology simply equivocal. There are affinities among the several meanings of each. They are, consequently, what are called analogical terms in classical semantics and family terms in contemporary semantics. The meanings of a given term are not independent of one another: They are related because of the way they have been developed by successive users. Something like the following must have happened and appears to be continuing. Consider the term 'profession,' for example. It was first used as a label for the traditional professions-law, medicine, architecture-and connoted their more prominent features . As new occupations struggled to be recognized, their advocates modified its meaning in order to extend the term to them, while striving to retain enough of the old connotations to warrant its continued use. Their efforts were met with resistance by other members of the speech community who were protective of the reputation of the original professions or just traditionally minded and who continued to use the term in its earlier sense. As a result 'profession' comes to designate a large family of occupations with criss-crossing similarities and differences. 'Professionalism' comes to designate a family of attitudes and skills with crisscrossing similarities and differences, and likewise 'professional' and 'professionalization." The short way out of the confusion for the sociologist would be to treat the words as technical terms (or substitute new terms for them) and stipulate definitions in the classical mode of genus and differentia, hoping to persuade other sociologists to adopt the usage by the empirical generalizations to which they might lead. Ideally, some sociological pioneer would establish a set of laws of professionalism that would be arranged in axiomatic form, which, after the manner of physical mechanics, would generate a vast number of theorems confirmed by measurements of phenomena. Unfortunately, the theory of professions has not worked out this way. Sociologists have not found a scheme of classification that results in generalizations with any significant predictive power. Instead statements in the various theories take the form of deductions from ideal-typical models that match real occupa- 59 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES tions only approximately, on the one hand, and statistical generalizations and tendency statements taken haphazardly from the data, on the other. Neither form of description is satisfactory for explaining the phenomena with which we are concerned. "Ideal-typifications" are advanced as models that represent actual professions in a complex way and give stable and precise meanings to the professional terminology. These models seem to have been constructed in the following manner (their authors are not always explicit): Prominent features of occupations widely recognized as professions are catalogued, A, B, C, ... No single occupation displays all of them. Rather the properties cluster for different occupations, AB, BC, AC, ... More precisely, none or few of the properties are possessed in the maximum degree by any occupation, but some are displayed in...