Profession

A profession arises when any trade or occupation transforms itself through "the development of formal qualifications based upon education, apprenticeship, and examinations, the emergence of regulatory bodies with powers to admit and discipline members, and some degree of monopoly rights."[15]

Originally, any regulation of the professions was self-regulation through bodies such as the College of Physicians or the Inns of Court. With the growing role of government, statutory bodies have increasingly taken on this role, their members being appointed either by the profession or (increasingly) by government. Proposals for the introduction or enhancement of statutory regulation may be welcomed by a profession as protecting clients and enhancing its quality and reputation, or as restricting access to the profession and hence enabling higher fees to be charged. It may be resisted as limiting the members' freedom to innovate or to practice as in their professional judgement they consider best.

An example was in 2008, when the British government proposed wide statutory regulation of psychologists. The inspiration for the change was a number of problems in the psychotherapy field, but there are various kinds of psychologist including many who have no clinical role and where the case for regulation was not so clear. Work psychology brought especial disagreement, with the British Psychological Society favoring statutory regulation of "occupational psychologists" and the Association of Business Psychologists resisting the statutory regulation of "business psychologists" – descriptions of professional activity which it may not be easy to distinguish.

Besides regulating access to a profession, professional bodies may set examinations of competence and enforce adherence to an ethical code. There may be several such bodies for one profession in a single country, an example being the accountancy bodies of the United Kingdom (ACCA, CAI, CIMA, CIPFA, ICAEW and ICAS), all of which have been given a Royal Charter, although their members are not necessarily considered to hold equivalent qualifications, and which operate alongside further bodies (AAPA, IFA, CPAA). Another example of a regulatory body that governs a profession is the Hong Kong Professional Teachers Union, which governs the conduct, rights, obligations and duties of salaried teachers working in educational institutions in Hong Kong.

The engineering profession is highly regulated in some countries (Canada and USA) with a strict licensing system for Professional Engineer that controls the practice but not in others (UK) where titles and qualifications are regulated Chartered Engineer but practice is not regulated.

Typically, individuals are required by law to be qualified by a local professional body before they are permitted to practice in that profession. However, in some countries, individuals may not be required by law to be qualified by such a professional body in order to practice, as is the case for accountancy in the United Kingdom (except for auditing and insolvency work which legally require qualification by a professional body). In such cases, qualification by the professional bodies is effectively still considered a prerequisite to practice as most employers and clients stipulate that the individual hold such qualifications before hiring their services. For example, in order to become a fully qualified teaching professional in Hong Kong working in a state or government-funded school, one needs to have successfully completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Education ("PGDE") or a bachelor's degree in Education ("BEd") at an approved tertiary educational institution or university. This requirement is set out by the Educational Department Bureau of Hong Kong, which is the governmental department that governs the Hong Kong education sector.

Professions tend to be autonomous, which means they have a high degree of control of their own affairs: "professionals are autonomous insofar as they can make independent judgments about their work".[16] This usually means "the freedom to exercise their professional judgement."[17]

However, it also has other meanings. "Professional autonomy is often described as a claim of professionals that has to serve primarily their own interests...this professional autonomy can only be maintained if members of the profession subject their activities and decisions to a critical evaluation by other members of the profession."[18] The concept of autonomy can therefore be seen to embrace not only judgement, but also self-interest and a continuous process of critical evaluation of ethics and procedures from within the profession itself.

One major implication of professional autonomy is the traditional ban on corporate practice of the professions, especially accounting, architecture, medicine, and law. This means that in many jurisdictions, these professionals cannot do business through regular for-profit corporations and raise capital rapidly through initial public offerings or flotations. Instead, if they wish to practice collectively they must form special business entities such as partnerships or professional corporations, which feature (1) reduced protection against liability for professional negligence and (2) severe limitations or outright prohibitions on ownership by non-professionals. The obvious implication of this is that all equity owners of the professional business entity must be professionals themselves. This avoids the possibility of a non-professional owner of the firm telling a professional how to do his or her job and thereby protects professional autonomy. The idea is that the only non-professional person who should be telling the professional what to do is the client; in other words, professional autonomy preserves the integrity of the two-party professional-client relationship. Above this client-professional relationship the profession requires the professional to use their autonomy to follow the rules of ethics that the profession requires. But because professional business entities are effectively locked out of the stock market, they tend to grow relatively slowly compared to public corporations.

Professions tend to have a high social status, regarded by society as highly important.[19] 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 licensure. 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.[20] 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.[21]

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",[22] 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."[23]

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."[24]

A critical characteristic of a profession is the need to cultivate and exercise professional discretion - that is, the ability to make case by case judgements that cannot be determined by an absolute rule or instruction.[25]

• Professional
• First professional degree
• Professional association (or body)
• Professional boundaries
• Professional class
• Professional development
• Professional responsibility
• Professional ethics
• Professionalization
• Semiprofession
• Norwegian Centre for the Study of Professions
• List of occupations

Cruess, S. R., Johnston, S. & Cruess R. L. (2004). "Profession": a working definition for medical educators. Teaching and learning in Medicine,16(1): 74–76.

Freidson, E. (1994). Professionalism reborn: Theory, prophecyand policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Gailmard, S. & Patty, J. W. (2007). Slackers and zealots: Civil service, policy discretion, and bureaucratic expertise. American Journal of Political Science, 51(4), 873–889. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2007.00286.x

Gulick, L. (1937). Notes on the theory of organization. In J. Shafritz & A. Hyde (Eds.), Classics of public administration, eighth edition (pp. 105–114). Boston, Massachusetts: Cengage Learning.

Howlett, M., McConnell, A., and Pearl, A. (2014). Streams and stages: Reconciling Kingdon and policy process theory. European Journal of Political Research, 54(3) 419–434. doi: 10.1111/1475-6765.12064

Lindblom, C. E. (1959). The science of "muddling through". In J. Shafritz and A. Hyde (Eds.), Classics of public administration, eighth edition, (pp. 172–182). Boston, Massachusetts: Cengage Learning.

Niskanen, Jr. (1971). Bureaucracy and Representative Government. New York: Imprint Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315081878

Sinek, S. (2019). The Infinite Game. New York: Random House

Surowiecki, J. (2005). The wisdom of crowds. New York: Random House.

Taylor, F. W. (1912). The principles of scientific management. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Taylor, E. B. (1878). Researches into the early history of mankind and the development of civilization. Boston: Estes and Lauriat.

• Abbott, A. (1998). The theory of professions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Brint, Steven. 1994. In an Age of Experts: The Changing Roles of Professionals in Politics and Public Life. Princeton University Press.
• Penelope J. Corfield, Power and the Professions in Britain, 1700–1850, Routledge, London, 1995.
• Yves Dezalay and David Sugarman, Professional Competition and Professional Power, Routledge, 1995, ISBN 0-203-97721-1.
• Eliot Freidson, Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, ISBN 0-226-26225-1.
• Joseph M. Jacob, Doctors and Rules: A Sociology of Professional Values, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick and London, 1999.
• Montgomery, Jonathan (1989). "Medicine, Accountability, and Professionalism". Journal of Law and Society. 16 (3): 319–39. doi:10.2307/1409987. JSTOR 1409987. hdl:10822/833082.