It is about ten years since I first came across this passage in The wealth of nations, Adam Smith’s foundational contribution to modern social science. It comes from a discussion of factors affecting the rewards of different kinds of occupations. Most of these fit more or less readily into the neoclassical model of labour supply, where wages are related to the conditions of work, the amount of investment needed to learn particular skills, the continuity of employment and the probability of success. As Paul Fenn and I noted, however, the idea that people might be paid more to secure trust had puzzled many economists (Dingwall & Fenn, 1987). Some of this may have diminished in more recent years as economists have become more interested in the question of trust and the extent to which markets depend upon non-market values and institutions for their effective functioning. These issues have been extensively popularized in the recent work of Francis Fukuyama (1995), for instance, where he points to the competitive disadvantages of low-trust societies, in which regulation has to substitute for honourable economic behaviour.

This paper continues my reflections on this text because I think it contains some very important clues to the questions about why professions emerge, what they are for and, just possibly, why they are inevitable in modern societies.

However, I think it has been arguable that the power of Larson’s rhetoric has led many of her followers to neglect two important qualifications. The first is her acknowledgement that the market is not passive:

She illustrates this in some detail as she analyses the limited power of professional institutions in engineering, relative to medicine, for example, in terms of the different balance between a profession serving powerful corporate clients as opposed to individuals. She also accepts the role of the state: “...to view professional modernization as a project of market control, underlines the central role of the state in the development of this project... (p. 18)“. Having made this concession, however, she offers little analysis of the state, tending to see this as a mere vehicle for the interests of capital.

Larson’s position is very typical of a line of work which has focussed on “occupational imperialism“, to use Larkin’s phrase (Parry & Parry, 1976; Parkin, 1979; Larkin, 1983). However, although it continues to be fashionable, as in the recent work of Witz (1992), there has been increasing disquiet about both the theoretical and the empirical basis of this argument. Johnson, for example, whose neo-Marxist analysis prefigured Larson’s work, has moved steadily away from an occupation-oriented position to one which places increasing emphasis on the interdependence of professions and the state (Johnson, 1995; Johnson, 1982; Johnson, 1977; Johnson, 1972). Fenn and I pointed to the general weakness of occupation-oriented analyses in explaining why the state chose to create market shelters through favourable regulation: at any historical point far more occupations were seeking this protection than were ever afforded it (Dingwall & Fenn, 1987). We suggested that professionalization might be a response to market failure rather than a form of market failure, as the conventional view proposed.

This shift from what I have come to call demand theories of professionalization to supply theories (Dingwall, 1995), in other words from stressing the occupation’s organized pursuit of its interest to the environmental conditions under which it is made, also seems more consistent with the empirical studies that are now being done. I made the point in the context of a reanalysis of Holloway’s (1991) study of the formation of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society in Britain, where I argued that the decisive moves to licensure owed less to the organization of pharmacists than to state responses to moral panic about the increasingly potent organic compounds that were becoming available and to a state project to tidy up the market for health care provision in support of its own developing stake in public health. Halliday’s (1987) study of the Chicago Bar, for example, had already pointed the incoherence of the idea of a professional project in a large and divided group and to the need to take seriously more structural analyses of the market and the state in creating the space within which professions operated. Although Abbott (1988) underplays the influence of the state, his analysis of the division of labour as a field of turf battles and his emphasis on the need for a systemic understanding of professions in relation to their environments and markets also directs our attention away from the kind of single case study that has often led to overgeneralization. More recently, Light’s (1995) discussion of professions in the context of political science notions of countervailing powers has started to catch us up academically with what any common-sense observer in the UK would have noticed for the last few years, namely that what professions have won or been given, can be lost or removed. His argument would perhaps be more familiar cast in economic terms: that the exploitation of a long-run market disequilibrium will ultimately lead to the emergence of opposing forces or the reorganization of production or supply to eliminate this rent. His particular target is the US medical profession, where the perception by major industrial corporations that high health insurance costs are imposing an international competitive disadvantage has finally brought interests of comparable weight into the political process. Perhaps General Motors and Ford can check the growth of medical incomes where consumer lobbies cannot. We are witnessing a similar struggle in the UK where the attempted reform of civil justice procedures, for the second time in a decade, is intended to have a direct effect on the profitability of legal work.

Perhaps, then, the time has come for a re-reading of the historical case studies on which the demand theory has been based and for a new attention to the relations between occupations and between occupations, markets and the state which sees the emergence of modern professions as a more complex story of the conjunction of interests and ideologies that we call modernization. In doing so, we may need to reappraise some earlier and neglected contributions. One of these will clearly be that of Talcott Parsons (1954). Whatever else we may say about his work, his perception of the extent to which professions were a creation of the modern world was absolutely fundamental:

However, this evening I want to focus for a few minutes on Herbert Spencer’s contribution to the analysis of professions, which Michael King and I have been revisiting (Dingwall & King, 1995).

Herbert Spencer was the most influential English-language sociologist of the nineteenth century, whose contributions have now been largely forgotten. However, our interest is not purely archaeological. Spencer observed the high period of industrial capitalism and was more responsible than anyone else for the introduction of systems thinking to sociology from his prior experience in engineering and biology. In his analysis of the dynamic of social change through ecological competition, he frames an account that was later taken up by Chicago sociology, first in examining the city and then in studying work and occupations. Although Abbott does not recognize it, his discussion of jurisdictional competition stands in a direct line of descent. Where the Chicago studies tended to emphasise local conflicts, however, Spencer saw that competition was a selection pressure at all levels of social organization. State formation, for example, was promoted by inter-group competition: war was part of the dynamic of progress at a certain period of human history.

Spencer sees the emergence of professions as intimately linked to the development of modern industrial states. In early phases of national development, societies tend to adopt what he calls the militant form with a tightly controlled command economy and central planning. However, this is a costly form of society to maintain because of the resources which are consumed in maintaining order and control. It lacks incentives for innovation and enterprise because rewards and goals are allocated by central planners rather than in proportion to individual contributions or initiatives. In times of peace, militant societies tend to be displaced by industrial forms which are marked by voluntary co-operation and forms of control designed to promote and support spontaneous order rather than to impose it. As with Webber, Spencer saw religion as playing an important part in the process. Its supernatural connections gave it a measure of autonomy from a militant state and its concerns for motivation and inner belief tended to make it an ally of industrial states. In the process, however, its sacred character is transferred to other, secular bodies. Some of these are the professions:

At the heart of Spencer’s scheme is a more positive view of professions as people with real skills and a beneficial contribution to society. They emerge at a stage when the basic needs of survival, order and production have been met and adopt the unique role of focussing on enhancing the quality of life. In the process, they also make possible a more loosely-coupled society where control is decentralized, hierarchies are flattened and boundaries made permeable. As Johnson (1995) has recently noted, from a different theoretical direction, in modern societies, professions are not opposed to states, nor are they part of them: rather professions and states perform sometimes complementary and sometimes competitive roles in a system of regulation, control or ordering which is greater than either.

With Spencer’s concern for the sacred character of professional work, we also return to the theme of uncertainty that I identified in the work of Adam Smith. This is a notion which is also central to the work of Hughes (1971) when he writes about the “guilty knowledge“ of professionals. One way in which we might see the emergence of professions in the nineteenth century is as a reflection of the process of modernization that formed the classic object of sociology. Old certainties had indeed disappeared but the need for certainty remained. The organization of lives depends upon the creation of certainty. On some occasions we need for all practical purposes ways of deciding the meaning of texts or resolving disputes without violence. Of course texts can be indefinitely reconstructed and disputes closed in many ways but one of the things which law supplies is a practical and legitimated certainty. If we are investing our capital in a major engineering project like a dam, a railway or a bridge, then we need some assurance that it will perform its intended function. Of course no engineer can guarantee that a suspension bridge will stand up in the face of a once in a hundred years climatic event unless it is built at a cost that would be wholly uneconomic: however, his or her professional judgement is the practical certainty that makes our investment possible. It is the foundation of our trust that the world is a less uncertain place than it might seem, were we constantly to reflect upon it. The nineteenth century is also the period of unification of societies. As even the smallest villages became drawn into the national society and economy, they came to need a consistent basis for dealing with each other. I suggest that it was this logic as much as any occupational imperialism that closed markets. When you develop a national framework of public health and social assistance provision, sustained by national taxation, then you must have a reasonably consistent means of interpreting and applying it. The village healer lost out precisely because she or he was only the village healer whose skills and legitimacy were acknowledged no further than that community. A large scale society demands comparable institutions to sustain and regulate it. These are not all to be found in the state but the modern nation-state could not have evolved without their co-evolution.

These observations also help to make sense of two otherwise puzzling phenomena. One is the variation between professions. Every commentator since Smith has noticed the differential distributions of material and symbolic rewards between different professions. However, the reasons for this have remained largely unexplored, beyond Smith’s comments on the level of competition. Why should levels of competition vary, though? Why do some professions have more effective monopolies and the power to extract rents as well as status? I suspect that there may be an answer to be found by considering the relationship between professions and the state in the management of order. The least rewarded and least regulated professions are those which are seen as most marginal to the maintenance of social integration over a national territory. In many societies, the dispersal of the preservation of the sacred with the break-up of the politico-ecclesiastical complex left the clergy with a largely residual role in which the state has often shown a relatively limited interest. In some, however, the clerical interest retained a hold over other professions that gave it a central position of power and influence within the nation. Ireland might be an example where the health professions remained subordinated to the Catholic hierarchy until relatively recent years. We might also note the varying status of the educational profession according to whether the educational system is seen merely as a supplier of technical labour or as the creator of morally-formed citizens in the way that some Mainland European states have viewed it.

The other point that I would draw to your attention is the way in which the ecclesiastical background provided the models of occupational organization adopted by professions. I sometimes think that one of the neglected topics of historical sociology is the influence of the churches on later secular organizational forms. Many of the techniques of discipline associated by Foucault with the nineteenth century, for example, have recognizable precursors in the monastic rules of earlier periods. In the same way, if we ask where the model of a self-governing corporation comes from, the answer must surely be certain religious orders and their subsidiary foundations in the medieval universities which survived the culling of the guilds. The gap left in Smith’s account for the choice of an organizational form for an occupational corporation might be filled by Spencer’s understanding of the sacred sources of professional work.

I have, I hope, painted a picture of the place of professions in the modern world which uses more colours in its palette than the monochrome of occupational imperialism that has dominated for so long. In doing so, I also hope that I have also begun to lay out a basis for thinking about professions in the contemporary world. I use this term advisedly because of my profound suspicion of the windy rhetoric of post-modernity. Nevertheless, I think that we do need to acknowledge the force of certain changes as we approach the second millennium of the Christian era.

In principle, we might be able to check anything: in practice life is too short. The expansion of information does not make us any more skilled at evaluating it. As we all recognize, the difficult thing is not collecting data but knowing what it means. It might be argued that judgement can also be computerized, that some sources might be hallmarked. But, as Smith saw, that kind of approach becomes more difficult to operate with less tangible products or services. I suspect that it will be very hard to eliminate intermediaries, whose ability to interpret information and apply it to our case will rest on familiar legitimations. By managing this, professionals allow the rest of us to have a life and it does not seem to me likely that we will readily forego this gain from the moral division of labour. Weather-god or meteorologist, the professional is our means of reducing uncertainty about important things that we cannot easily or economically verify for ourselves.

If I suggest that this is one aspect of the market for professional services, another might be the emergence of state-like formations above the level of the nation. Here again I think we return to the insights of Smith and Spencer. There is a sense in which globalization recapitulates an eighteenth and nineteenth century experience. One of the great transformations that the classic sociologists observed was the creation of effective national markets. Trade was not defined by the speed of a wagon or the carrying capacity of a pack animal. Canals, turnpikes and railways opened up and unified nations. Further advances in the division of labour became possible as areas specialized in goods for which they had a comparative advantage. The accelerated and democratized mobility of peoples unified national cultures and created national languages. Starr (1982, pp. 69-71) has noted the impact of the automobile and the telephone on medical practice. He suggests that they led to productivity gains of the order of 300 per cent, reducing cost and increasing accessibility. I am not aware of similar calculations for other professions but I would be surprised if they were very different. It became increasingly possible for everyone to live within reach of a professional and to be able to travel over longer distances to sustain specialism in practice. At the same time, these material changes facilitated the kind of cultural standardization that I have noted. A rural community in the 1870s might have had no choice but to use a traditional midwife for a home delivery: by the 1920s that community would be within the catchment of an officially licensed practitioner and might well have sufficient means of transport to move a woman in labour to a hospital. The choice of birthplace and birth attendant became a real choice. A common theme in recent Westerns has been the bringing of order to the frontier. In the absence of judges, lawyers and law-enforcement, people had to settle their own disputes in their own ways. By the 1890s, the spread of the railroads and the creation of national markets made this increasingly difficult to sustain. A chain of contracts stretching from the Southwest through the Mid-West to the East Coast could not dependably rest on the gun to define property rights in land or cattle. National markets required national law, national accountancy and so on. When the great capital projects of the period were being undertaken, an important part of the security for investors was the certified skills of the constructors. The first railways may have been built by self-taught engineers but, by the end of the century, elaborate systems of apprenticeship and formal examination had developed.

If we recognize the symbiotic role of professionals and markets, then we can see the functional logic of their globalization. Spencer thought that the nation state would be a passing phase in human society. He was very critical of its extension through colonialism, where the organization of colonial economic life was subordinated to that of the metropolis. In his view, non-European peoples should have been brought into a regime of free international trade that would allow them to identify for themselves where their comparative advantages lay and to concentrate on these. However, that market would still require an order: a contract would need to be a contract, wherever it was made. It is this, I suspect, that will pull the professions into a global organization of some kind which transcends that of the nation state. If we look at the international marketplace today, we see much of the unregulated and anarchic capitalism that our predecessors saw. Ultimately, that order proved to be unsustainable. The logic of large-scale enterprise required a degree of management of its organizational environment that tamed the system. When you have to mobilize capital globally to build the Channel Tunnel or the bridge from Sweden to Denmark, then you need engineers whose skill will be acknowledged by every international banker and you need a legal and accounting regime that everybody trusts.

The global order needs trust-promoting groups just as much as the national one did. Those groups will not necessarily be organized in the same way as professions in the era of nation-states. Their descent from national professions may be more symbolic than real, just as with the lineage from the medieval professions to the modern. Global professions may not sit alongside a single state-like entity but form part of a network of international bodies involved in regulating, co-ordinating and managing economic activity and political risk. National professions may co-exist with them in some areas which are less touched by the global order –health and social welfare may be a particular example. If I am convinced of one thing, however, it is that obituaries for the professions are decidedly premature. I suspect that our successors on the eve of the Third Millennium will still be discussing them with the same mixture of suspicion and admiration.