What are Professions?

During the medieval period, medicine, law, and the clergy evolved into the first modern professions through university-based education and specialized training. As society became more secular, these professions gained independence and formed professional associations. By the nineteenth century, occupations such as dentistry, architecture, and engineering also began professionalizing to achieve similar status.

A profession is distinguished from a nonprofessional occupation through several key characteristics. These include establishing formal systems of recruitment and training, creating professional associations, setting strict membership and practice standards, obtaining official recognition, and developing a code of ethics. Together, these elements help an occupation gain professional status, authority, and control over its field of expertise.

Formal education plays a central role in professionalization. Requiring specialized university training serves both as a gatekeeping mechanism and a way to enhance the occupation’s status. By making formal qualifications necessary, professions establish control over specialized knowledge and limit entry to those who meet educational requirements. This process also reduces the legitimacy of knowledge gained solely through experience and ensures that practitioners share a common foundation of training, values, and professional socialization.

Professional organizations further strengthen an occupation’s standing. These associations promote and disseminate knowledge, represent practitioners’ interests, and establish standards for practice. Strict membership requirements help define who belongs to the profession and create unity among practitioners. By agreeing on common standards and restricting membership to qualified individuals, professions can achieve “closure,” meaning collective control over entry into the field.

Official recognition, particularly through state licensing, is another crucial step. Licensure grants practitioners exclusive legal authority to perform certain tasks or provide specific services. This allows professions such as medicine and law to protect their jurisdiction and limit competition from unqualified individuals. In these fields, formal certification through education and examinations cannot be replaced by experience alone.

A code of ethics is equally essential. It defines acceptable professional behavior, promotes accountability, and demonstrates a commitment to serving the public’s interests. Ethical standards help build public trust in practitioners’ competence, integrity, and judgment. They also establish practitioners’ responsibilities to clients, colleagues, and the profession itself, emphasizing values such as honesty, loyalty, trustworthiness, and good judgment. Ultimately, ethical codes and professional guidelines help professions maintain internal discipline, minimize external interference, and ensure that members monitor and uphold high standards of conduct.

In ”Some problems in the sociology of professions”(1963), Benjamin Barber, from a functionalist viewpoint, studies the role, position, and rewards of higher professionals. He argues that ‘four essential attributes’ are pertinent to all professions. 1. Professionals are required to have a systematic and generalised knowledge applicable to a variety of issues. I. e., physicians treat a wide range of medical conditions. 2. Professionals are guided by public service and the interests of the community rather than focusing on seeking selfish goals. 3. Professionals are obliged to follow a stringent code of ethics that is established by professional associations and is overseen and enforced through punishment by them and other public and private institutions. 4. Due to their contributions to the well-being of society, professionals are justly rewarded with high social status, power, and higher salaries. 

Harold Wilensky, in the article „Orderly Careers and Social Participation” (1961), argues that the concept of a professional career should be limited to individual advancement within an organization. This approach is aimed at upward mobility within the organization, and is therefore related to the idea of ​​an "orderly career". He concludes that occupations that are characterized by a very slow ascending career of employees cannot be regarded as real professions.

                                    Types of Professions

The concept of a profession today covers a wide range of occupations that vary in prestige, autonomy, and social status. At the top of the professional hierarchy are the traditional or “status” professions, such as medicine, law, the clergy, and university teaching. Members of these professions typically earn high incomes, enjoy considerable independence in their work, and receive respect from the public. Their professional status is reinforced through strict licensing requirements that control entry into the occupation and protect their authority and expertise.

However, not all professions enjoy the same degree of autonomy. Newer professions are often organized differently and are more closely tied to business and organizational structures. For example, engineering possesses specialized knowledge and requires extensive education, but it lacks universal licensing requirements that would allow it to control entry into the field. As a result, engineers cannot claim the same level of professional independence as doctors or lawyers. Their careers are often shaped by organizational goals, and advancement may depend more on success within bureaucratic institutions than on professional identity alone.

Other occupations occupy intermediate positions on the professional continuum. Military personnel undergo extensive training but operate within highly structured organizations that limit individual autonomy. Similarly, administrators and managers may receive specialized education and belong to professional associations, but they generally have less professional independence than members of the classic professions.

Further down the continuum are “marginal professions” such as pharmacy and chiropractic, and “semiprofessions” such as nursing, teaching, social work, and librarianship. These occupations share some characteristics of traditional professions, including specialized knowledge and training, but they lack full professional status. They often face resistance from established professions, have less public recognition of their expertise, receive lower pay, and work under greater organizational supervision. Unlike the classic professions, they do not possess a monopoly over their specialized knowledge.

At the lowest level are paraprofessionals, who assist professionals in carrying out their work. Examples include paralegals working with lawyers and physician assistants supporting doctors. While skilled and trained, paraprofessionals typically function in subordinate roles rather than as independent professionals.

                            Process of Professionalization

In order to determine what makes a profession a profession, Wilensky analyzed eighteen professions, and based on that research, he made a sequential model of professional development, which emphasizes the highest stages of a profession. According to him, professionalization follows a series of stages through which an occupation gains control over its area of expertise, or jurisdiction. The process begins when individuals start working full-time in a specialized set of tasks that define the occupation. Next, university-based training programs are established to educate future practitioners and standardize knowledge. Practitioners and educators then form professional associations to define the occupation’s core functions and assert claims to specialized skills. Afterward, members seek legal recognition and protection through licensing and certification, creating barriers to entry and securing a monopoly over professional work. The final stage involves developing a formal code of ethics that protects clients, excludes unqualified practitioners, and emphasizes service to the public. Wilensky viewed professional development as a largely sequential process, although later scholars have questioned whether professionalization always follows this linear pattern.

                    Theoretical Approaches to Professions

In the 1960s, a group of scholars known as power theorists challenged earlier views that professions could be defined simply by characteristics such as specialized knowledge, ethics, or service orientation. Instead, they argued that professions achieve their status because they possess the power to persuade society that they are uniquely qualified and deserving of authority. According to theorists such as Eliot Freidson and Magali Sarfatti Larson, professions function as monopolistic organizations that seek to control markets for their expertise, maintain privileged positions, and protect their status. From this perspective, claims of altruism and public service often serve as ideological tools that help professions gain public trust, justify their autonomy, and reduce external oversight.

Power theorists also argue that professional autonomy can sometimes be misused. Because professions largely regulate themselves, incompetent practitioners may avoid meaningful sanctions from their peers. At the same time, professional authority has weakened somewhat as the public has become better educated and more willing to question expert advice, seek second opinions, and independently research medical, legal, and other professional issues.

Historical conflicts between professions demonstrate how professional power operates. For example, physicians have often competed with pharmacists and chiropractors to maintain control over healthcare-related work. Professions are most successful when their tasks involve uncertainty, judgment, and complex knowledge that cannot easily be standardized or routinized. Clients continue to rely on professionals to interpret specialized knowledge and translate technical concepts into understandable terms.

Building on these ideas, Andrew Abbott developed a broader theory of professions that rejected the notion of a simple, linear path to professionalization. Through historical and comparative research, Abbott argued that professions exist within an interconnected “system of professions” characterized by ongoing competition and jurisdictional disputes. Rather than developing independently, professions continually compete over control of specialized knowledge and professional tasks. They define, defend, and sometimes expand their jurisdictions by claiming authority over new areas of work.

These interprofessional struggles can reshape the entire professional system. Some occupations gain influence, others become subordinate, and some disappear altogether. Abbott therefore emphasized that understanding professions requires examining the historical relationships and conflicts among occupations. He also advocated a multilevel approach that connects individual careers, organizational structures, and broader occupational systems to explain how professional jurisdictions evolve over time.

Charles Wright Mills, in his book White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), attributed the increase in the size of a part of the middle class, the so-called "white collars" (professions), to three processes: the growth of bureaucracy in all spheres of work, the development of technology, and the growth of industrial production. The division of labor has led to the work of white-collar workers being very limited to a specific task within the company, and the work process itself being very routine and automated. This has led to a reduction in autonomy and the expansion of semi-professional jobs, which have a low level of authority, income, and prestige. White-collar workers are experiencing increasing alienation, both at work and outside of work. Mills saw a decline in the reputation, autonomy, power, and income of white-collar workers, and in addition to the previously mentioned causes, he cited an increase in the population with higher education, increased white-collar unemployment, and a reduction in the pay gap between white-collar workers and manual workers. University education has also transformed, so it is increasingly focused on the adoption of practical knowledge and social values ​​that serve to better prepare students for effective integration into large bureaucratic systems in the business or government sphere.

                                    Race and Professions

In The Decline of the Significance of Race (1978), Wilson examines the importance of class affiliation and social mobility for racial relations in America. He concludes that African-Americans, who belong to the middle and upper classes, i.e., those who have graduated from college and are employed in highly paid professions, have resources for upward socio-economic mobility, while African-Americans who belong to the lower class do not have such resources. The African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s diminished the importance of race and enabled the creation of a large African-American middle class, so in the late 1970s, class affiliation affected life chances more than race.

Data from the United States in 1998 reveal significant racial disparities within professional occupations. Black workers were underrepresented in many high-status professions compared to their overall share of the labor force (11%). For example, Black individuals accounted for only 5% of physicians, 6% of college and university faculty, 4% of lawyers, and 9% of clergy members. In contrast, they were overrepresented in several other professional fields, including dietitians (18%), respiratory therapists (12%), prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers (14%), educational and vocational counselors (13%), social workers (23%), recreation workers (16%), and athletes (13%). These patterns highlight the uneven distribution of racial groups across different professional occupations. Data from 2025 show that the share of African-Americans in some professions grew over time, as 6% of lawyers were African-American, while their share of physicians and college and university faculty stayed almost the same.

                                 Professions and Gender

Professional occupations remain highly segregated by gender, despite women making significant gains in some fields. Semiprofessions such as nursing, teaching, social work, and librarianship have historically been dominated by women, who also make up the majority of paraprofessional workers. Although women represented 53% of professionals in 1998, they were often concentrated in lower-paying and less prestigious positions than men, even within the same professions.

For example, women lawyers were more likely to work in government, research, or specialties such as trusts and estates, while women physicians tended to specialize in pediatrics and work in health maintenance organizations. Research suggests that as professions become more accessible to women, internal divisions often channel them into less rewarding sectors. In pharmacy, for instance, women’s representation increased substantially between 1970 and 1998, yet women were concentrated in lower-paying hospital positions while men dominated higher-paying retail jobs.

Although women made important advances into traditionally male professions after the 1970s, men still predominated in many high-status occupations in 1998, including medicine, law, the clergy, dentistry, engineering, and architecture. Accounting was a notable exception, with women comprising a majority of accountants and auditors. Overall, gender segregation and inequalities in status, specialization, and pay persisted across professional occupations.

Table 1. Percentage of women in the US by profession.

In Men and Women of the Corporation (1977), Rosabeth Moss Kanter developed the concepts of tokenism and homosocial reproduction to explain the workplace experiences of minorities, based on her study of women in a large corporation. Tokenism occurs when a subgroup makes up less than about 15% of a group, leaving them with little power or influence. Individuals in this position—often women or racial minorities—tend to experience isolation, heightened pressure, limited career opportunities, exclusion from networks, and a lack of respect. Kanter identifies three main effects of token status: 1) Increased visibility – tokens are highly noticeable and face greater scrutiny, leading them either to overperform or try to stay unnoticed. 2) Boundary heightening – differences between the dominant group and tokens are exaggerated, reinforcing separation. 3) Stereotyping – tokens are expected to conform to predefined roles, and may either resist these stereotypes or assimilate into them, often reinforcing the stereotypes further. Overall, tokenism creates significant barriers to equality, performance, and career advancement for minority group members in organizations.

In the book Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Inroads into Male Occupations (1990), Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos conclude that since 1970, women have succeeded in entering some professions that, until then, were exclusively male. Based on research conducted for ten case studies of women from different professions, they came up with a "queuing theory" that refers to the gender composition of a profession. The queuing theory starts from the assumption that employers, in most professions, prefer to hire men. Workers of both genders, on the other hand, also make lists of the most desirable professions. The result of these two lists of preferences is that the best-ranked workers take the most desirable jobs. Only when there is a shortage of qualified men for a profession can women "get their turn" to enter that profession. Even when entering a profession, advancement in the hierarchy is still limited for women. Reskin and Ross also concluded that race and ethnicity, in addition to gender, also affect professional segregation and differences in wages. Millett argues that economic inequalities are exacerbated by educational inequalities, as women are educated for professions that are less paid and less valued;

Rosemary Crompton, in the book White-Collar Proletariat: Deskilling and Gender in Clerical Work (1984),  concluded that women working as white-collar workers had little chance of upward career mobility. In addition, research has shown that most white-collar workers have experienced a decline in expertise and that promotions to middle positions have often been more formal than actual career advancement. In her book Gendered Jobs and Social Change (1990), Crompton uses the theoretical framework of Giddens' structuration theory to show that gender differences in the labor market must be explained in different ways, depending on the type and structure of a particular profession. Although gender differences persist in almost all professions, in some professions these differences are declining much faster than in others. The success of middle-class men depends on women's domestic work, as well as on the fact that women, on average, do worse jobs and progress in their careers more slowly. To understand economic inequalities, it is necessary to understand gender inequalities. During her fieldwork, Crompton noted that fewer and fewer young women are willing to accept traditional gender roles. Women are the bearers of social change and the transformation of class relations. She has studied class, household, and gender relations in several European countries. She placed more emphasis on data obtained by qualitative methods than on the data provided by official statistics.

Cynthia F. Epstein, in Women's Place: Option and Limits on Professional Careers (1970), examines women's ability to pursue the most prestigious professions, with the greatest focus on the legal profession. The theoretical framework of this research was Merton's neo-functionalism. In the 1960s, the share of women in the labor force in the United States was significant, but they were pushed to occupations "appropriate" for women and were almost excluded from the most prestigious professions. Epstein concluded that men, who were leaders in prestigious professions, were very openly opposed to the inclusion of women in those professions. In addition, there were very limited quotas for women's enrollment in medical and law schools. Discrimination continued for women who managed to graduate from college, because the men who decided on employment, both in private companies and in state institutions, refused to hire women.

In a later study on African-American women in prestigious professions, Epstein found that female respondents who did not work in government institutions were able to find employment and advance in private companies because some employers wanted to fill officially required employment quotas for two minority groups (women and African-Americans). In a study, Women in Law (1981), Epstein focused on female lawyers who worked in large companies; Epstein found that there were changes, but they still did not achieve equal status. Instead of actively opposing the employment of women and openly doubting the intellectual abilities of women, as was the case three decades earlier, women most often experienced a halt in their career advancement at the middle levels of the hierarchy. This kind of "glass ceiling", which is mostly reflected in the differences in salaries, was conditioned by the stereotype that states that female lawyers display different attitudes toward their clients. 

Sylvia Walby, in the book Patriarchy at Work (1986), explores the role of unions in maintaining patriarchy. In the engineering professions, men directly excluded women from the possibility of employment in those professions, while in the textile and clerical professions, male trade unions used a ranking system to limit women's advancement. She believes that unions are patriarchal institutions that limit women's ability to get good jobs or to find them at all, which makes women financially dependent on men and forces them to take responsibility for household chores.

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