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Discussing Terms: Professions, Professionals, Professionalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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“Who's a Professional? Who Cares?” asked a prominent historian nearly a decade ago. In the essay that followed the answer was shrewdly crafted. Because so many Americans have cared to call their occupational activity professional, few have succeeded in bringing to the concept a consistent and coherent interpretation. When nearly everyone “cares,” from gamblers and killers to jet fighters and physicians, the question “who's a professional?” loses its seriousness of meaning. The criticism cut to the bone. It served to question the integrity of the historical field of inquiry. Ironically, if students of the professions can not find a coherent body of knowledge in the subject, a similarity of pattern, then they are using the concept falsely – that is, unprofessionally.

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Research Article
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

NOTES

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26. Numerous editions of American dictionaries – Webster, Worcester, Century, Funk & Wagnalls – appeared regularly in nineteenth-century America, in addition to dictionaries of Americanisms – Bartlett, DeVere, Farmer – and slang. For historians, these editions constitute a useful but seldom consulted source for investigation.

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30. The most recent study is Starr, American Medicine.

31. This literature is substantial. For some landmarks see Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar; Israel, Jerry, ed., Building the Organization Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modern America (New York: Free Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Kirschner, Don S., “‘Publicity Properly Applied’: The Selling of Expertise in America, 1900–1929,” American Studies, 19 (Spring 1978), 6578Google Scholar. In an influential work, Haskell, Thomas, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977)Google Scholar developed a modified Parsonian point of view. In criticism of the direction of the historiography see Hobson, Wayne K., “Professionals, Progressives and Bureaucratization: a Reassessment,” The Historian, 39 (08 1977), 639–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a recent different perspective on the era, see Macleod, David I., Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).Google Scholar

32. Mead quoted in Diner, Steven J., “George Herbert Mead's Ideas on Women and Careers: A Letter to his Daughter-in-Law, 1920,” Signs, 4 (1978), 408–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Diner, Steven J., “Department and Discipline: The Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, 1892–1920,” Minerva, 13 (Winter 1975), 514–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenberg, , Beyond Separate Spheres, pp. 137–8.Google Scholar

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34. Historians of anthropology are currently examining this theme in English ethnography. See Parssinen, Carol Ann, “Social Explorers and Social Scientists: The Dark Continent of Victorian Ethnography,” in Ruby, Jay, ed., A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), pp. 205–17Google Scholar; Stocking, George W. Jr., “The Ethnographer's Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski,” in Stocking, George W. Jr., ed., Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 70120Google Scholar; Clifford, James, “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations, 1 (Spring 1983), 118–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. Freud, Sigmund, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” in Rieff, Philip, ed., Therapy and Technique (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 268, 266.Google Scholar