American Professors in the Progressive Era: Incomes, Aspirations, and Professionalism

Abstract

American Professors in the Progressive Era: Incomes, Aspirations, and Professionalism In all that has been written about the professions, little has been done to analyze the social and economic history of individual professions or to test the linkages between professionalization and material success. On the contrary, Greenwood argued that professionals perform services primarily for psychic satisfaction and only secondarily for monetary compensation. Self-seeking motives feature only minimally in the choice of the profession. ... Wiebe echoed the anti-materialist conception, claiming that the new professionals in the progressive era lost that [once common] appreciation for fine gradations of wealth and its display.... Careful comparisons of income were replaced by vaguer concerns about the moral and social implications of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. In this way, Greenwood and Wiebe continued a tradition which set the motives of professionals against those of liberal capitalist society.1 But social science and common sense supported an alternative view. It was always unrealistic to assume that professionals, even academics, were free of concerns about money; income and con-