Community Within a Community: The Professions

Abstract

HIS paper is concerned with a little explored area of social theory: the structural strains and supports between a contained and the larger society of which it is a part and on which it is dependent. Presumably, the body of theory used for analyzing a must be translated, qualified, or changed when that exists within a larger society. Examples of such communities are fraternal orders such as the Masons, secret or extreme political parties, ethic islands whether rural or urban, organized political or economic interest groups, or a specific profession such as medicine.' From a broad inquiry into such structural relations between the contained and the larger one, it may later be possible to derive important hypotheses about the forces that maintain both of them. studied is the professional community, which is different in important respects from the other examples.2 Only two sets of links have been chosen for exploration: (1) socialization and social control, and (2) client choice or evaluation of the professional. Characteristic of each of the established professions, and a goal of each aspiring occupation, is the community of profession. Each profession is a without physical locus and, like other communities with heavy in-migration, one whose founding fathers are linked only rarely by blood with the present generation. It may nevertheless be called a by virtue of these characteristics: (1) Its members are bound by a sense of identity. (2) Once in it, few leave, so that it is a terminal or continuing status for the most part.3 (3) Its members share values in common. (4) Its role definitions vis-a-vis both members and non-members are agreed upon and are the same for all members. (5) Within the areas of communal action there is a common language, which is understood only partially by outsiders. (6) Community has power over its members. ( 7) Its limits are reasonably clear, though they are not physical and geographical, but social. (8) Though it does not produce the next generation biologically, it does so socially through its control over the selection of professional trainees, and through its training processes it sends these recruits through an adult socialization process. Of course, professions vary in the degree to which they are communities, and it is not novel to view them as such.4 * Paper read at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological March, 1956. Morris Zelditch has given various helpful comments to the author. 1 See, for example, Georg Simmel, The Secret and the Secret Society, in Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated by Kurt Wolff, Glencoe: Free Press, 1950, pp. 307-379; William F. Whyte, Street Corner Chicago: University of Chicago, 1943; Louis Kriesberg, National Security and Conduct in the Steel Gray Market, Social Forces, 34 (March, 1956), pp. 268-277, and Customer versus Colleague Ties Among Retail Furriers, Journal of Retailing, 29-30 (Winter, 1954-5), pp. 173-176; Executive Life, ed. Fortune, Garden City: Doubleday, 1956; Allan W. Eister, The Oxford Group Movement, Sociology and Social Research, 34 (November, 1949); David Riesman, Some Informal Notes on American Churches and Sects, Confluence, 4 (July, 1955), pp. 127-159; Paula Brown, Bureaucracy in a Government Laboratory, Institute of Industrial Relations Reprint No. 36, Los Angeles: University of California, 1954; etc. 2 Other areas are analyzed in William J. Goode, Robert K. Merton, and Mary Jean Huntington, Professions in Modern New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1957 (in press). 3 But see the qualifications stated by Albert J. Reiss, Occupational Mobility of Professional Workers, American Sociological Review, 20 (December, 1955), pp. 693-700. 4 See the extended discussion of Discipline, p. 394 ff. in A. M. Carr-Saunders and P. A. Wilson, Professions, Oxford: Clarendon, 1933; Morris L. Cogan, Toward a Definition of Harvard Educational Review, 23 (Winter, 1953), p. 35; Roscoe Pound, Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times, St. Paul: West, 1953, pp. 4-10; Abraham Flexner, Is Social Work a Profession? School and 1 (1915), pp. 901-911; Louis D. Brandeis, Business-A Profession, Boston: Small,