Educating Professionals and Professional Education in a Geographical Context

Abstract

AbstractEconomic geography has a well‐established tradition of studying a range of professional service firms (PSFs), including law, advertising, architecture, accountancy, management consultancy and banking. Within this literature, considerable attention has been paid to the role of highly skilled professionals who use their expertise to deliver bespoke, knowledge‐rich products to a range of corporate clients. However, comparatively, little attention has been paid to the role of professional education, offered by institutions such as law schools, university business schools and professional associations in preparing future employees for their careers in PSFs. This forms part of a broader silence within economic geography on the role of different forms of education in the legitimisation and emergence of powerful professional industries and practices. In this article, we begin to address this lacuna by showing how geographers’ understanding of professional industries and firms can be enhanced by integrating studies from the sociology of the professions, research into the so‐called ‘knowledge‐based economy’ more generally and studies of the spatial heterogeneity of professional practice that all focus specifically on the socialising and legitimating influence of educational institutions and practices. Two arguments run throughout the article. First, we identify the different roles played by professional education in relation to the production of professionals and the regulation of PSFs. We argue that the way the activities of PSFs have been limited by the regulation of education to date has been understudied, something that has continued as forms of transnational regulation emerge that create new questions about the geographies of the professions. Second, we consider how the relationship between professional education and PSFs varies both geographically and between different professions. We show that coupling an understanding of these geographies to debates about the varieties of capitalism offers a fruitful way to better understand the forms of continuity and change in national institutions and capitalisms. Combined, we suggest that economic geography can learn a lot about the spatial peculiarities of different professions from studies of professional education, something that is in need of significant empirically grounded research.