Commentary on “Professional Power & Self-Regulation” and “Professional Values and the Problem of Regulation”

Abstract

I must admit to a certain suspicion that arises whenever I hear the term, regulating. A few years ago I researched the diaries of Marilla Wells Leggett, who was a housewife here in the Western Reserve region in the mid nineteenth century. Marilla Leggett frequently noted in her diary that she had spent a morning the house. I wondered, what machines could she be regulating at the very beginning of the industrial age? Eventually I found out, of course, that she had been a victim of the con job done by the earliest women's magazines, whose task it was to convince women to stay at home while their husbands began to taste the new freedoms of work away from the homestead. Thus, instead of cleaning the house, Marilla it. So I begin by wondering what sorts of conning may be represented by the concept of the professions? For example, one thing to suspect in discussions about regulating the social work profession, is that while arguing for the necessity of professional standards, the powerful group in the profession is actually attempting to clean out those whose creativity and daring threaten their security. I would further suggest that Ohio's new licensing laws for social workers may have at their root a thinly disguised self interest: first, the desire to compete with other professions for insurance payments (which will be a boon to clients only if social workers prove to be better counselors than other professionals); second, the desire to eliminate from our professional ranks those who either have not been able or have not been willing to put themselves through the expensive and often deadening experience of professional education. At a more basic level, I must also ask if we are correct in assuming that regulation will have a positive effect upon professional workers, or upon their client constituencies? Looking at our society as a whole, one can argue that in a time when our nation is increasingly regulated by legislation, it is also