Cou rtesy : Bachelor of Education

Status, prestige, and power

Main article: Occupational prestige

Professions tend to have a high social status, regarded by society as highly important. This high esteem arises primarily from the higher social function of their work. The typical profession involves technical, specialized, and highly skilled work. This skill and experience is often referred to as “professional expertise.” In the modern era, training for a profession involves obtaining degrees and certifications. Often, entry to the profession is barred without license. Learning new skills that are required as a profession evolves is called continuing education. Standards are set by states and associations. Leading professionals tend to police and protect their area of expertise and monitor the conduct of their fellow professionals through associations, national or otherwise. Professionals often exercise a dominating influence over related trades, setting guidelines and standards. Socially powerful professionals consolidate their power in organizations for specific goals. Working together, they can reduce bureaucratic entanglements and increase a profession’s adaptability to the changing conditions of the world. # ISO certification in India

Sociology

Émile Durkheim argued that professions created a stable society by providing structure separate from the state and the military that was less inclined to create authoritarianism or anomie and could create altruism and encourage social responsibility and altruism. This functionalist perspective was extended by Parsons who considered how the function of a profession could change in responses to changes in society.# ISO certification in India

Esther Lucile Brown, an anthropologist, studied various professions starting the 1930s while working with Ralph Hurlin at the Russell Sage Foundation. She published Social Work as a Profession in 1935, and following this publications studying the work of engineers, nurses, medical physicians and lawyers. In 1944, the Department of Studies in the Professions was created at the Russell Sage Foundation with Brown as its head.

Theories based on conflict theories following Marx and Weber consider how professions can act in the interest of their own group to secure social and financial benefits were espoused by Johnson (Professions and Powers, 1972) and Larson (The Rise of Professionalism, 1977). One way that a profession can derive financial benefits is limiting the supply of services.# ISO certification in India

Theories based on discourse, following Mead and applying ideas of Sartre and Heidegger look at how the individual’s understanding of reality influence the role of professions. These viewpoints were espoused by Berger and Luckmann (The Social Construction of Reality, 1966).

System of professions

Andrew Abbott constructed a sociological model of professions in his book The System of Professions. Abbott views professions as having jurisdiction over the right to carry out tasks with different possession vying for control of jurisdiction over tasks.# ISO certification in India

A profession often possesses an expert knowledge system which is distinct from the profession itself. This abstract system is often not of direct practical use but is rather optimized for logical consistency and rationality, and to some degree acts to increase the status of the entire profession. One profession may seek control of another profession’s jurisdiction by challenging it at this academic level. Abbott argues that in the 1920s the psychiatric profession tried to challenge the legal profession for control over society’s response to criminal behavior. Abbott argues the formalization of a profession often serves to make a jurisdiction easier or harder to protect from other jurisdictions: general principles making it harder for other professions to gain jurisdiction over one area, clear boundaries preventing encroachment, fuzzy boundaries making it easier for one profession to take jurisdiction over other tasks.# ISO certification in India

Professions may expand their jurisdiction by other means. Lay education on the part of professions as in part an attempt to expand jurisdiction by imposing a particular understanding on the world (one in which the profession has expertise). He terms this sort of jurisdiction public jurisdiction. Legal jurisdiction is a monopoly created by the state legislation, as applies to law in many nations.# ISO certification in India

Characteristics

There is considerable agreement about defining the characteristic features of a profession. They have a “professional association, cognitive base, institutionalized training, licensing, work autonomy, colleague control… (and) code of ethics”, to which Larson then also adds, “high standards of professional and intellectual excellence,” (Larson, p. 221) that “professions are occupations with special power and prestige”, (Larson, p.x) and that they comprise “an exclusive elite group,” (Larson, p. 20) in all societies. Members of a profession have also been defined as “workers whose qualities of detachment, autonomy, and group allegiance are more extensive than those found among other groups…their attributes include a high degree of systematic knowledge; strong community orientation and loyalty; self-regulation; and a system of rewards defined and administered by the community of workers.”# ISO certification in India

A profession has been further defined as: “a special type of occupation…(possessing) corporate solidarity…prolonged specialized training in a body of abstract knowledge, and a collectivity or service orientation…a vocational sub-culture which comprises implicit codes of behavior, generates an esprit de corps among members of the same profession, and ensures them certain occupational advantages…(also) bureaucratic structures and monopolistic privileges to perform certain types of work…professional literature, legislation, etc.”# ISO certification in India

A critical characteristic of a profession is the need to cultivate and exercise professional discretion – that is, the ability to make case by case judgments that cannot be determined by an absolute rule or instruction.# ISO certification in India