The history of professions and professionalisation

Introduction

This chapter begins by considering the transition of the regulation of work in many parts of the modern world from localised medieval guilds, which in this context are echoes of professional formation from a historic past. As such, they have some similar features to the national professional bodies that emerged by the 1960s and 1970s through the process of professionalisation. This account will focus on Britain and the United States where the development of professions will be classically exemplified primarily, but not exclusively, with reference to medicine and law, archetypical professional groups centred on ring-fenced associations supported and legitimated by legislation. It will compare the development of professions in these two rather different variants of capitalism with trends in professionalisation internationally - not least in continental Europe and the then socialist countries of China and Russia, in the latter largely before the impact of perestroika and glasnost took hold in post-Soviet times (White, 2000).

Some writers have seen professionalisation as an inevitably increasing convergent development in modem industrial societies based on the determining consequences of technological change (see, for instance, Kerr et al, 1960). This is associated with a logic of industrialisation leading countries to become ever more alike - notwithstanding national cultural differences - in terms of the rising differentiation of the division of labour, growing specialisation, and increasing skills and competencies. It is argued in this book, though, that there is much variation both within and between societies in the way that this occurs and that the particular destination ultimately reached is primarily the result of specific socio-political and historical factors. In these terms, as we shall see later in this chapter, attempts to professionalise with the support of the state can fail as well as succeed in a dynamic process in which professions may come to the fore and fall back with societal change. However, for the moment, the focus is on the emergence of guilds and how these became transformed into professions - a subject to which we now turn.

The guilds and their demise

The guilds for a range of occupations from goldsmiths and musicians to potters and shoemakers can be traced back to ancient Roman times (Epstein, 1991). Craft guilds are defined by Krause (1996:2) as “institutions created by groups of workers around their work, their skill or craft.” As he notes, such guilds - alongside merchant guilds which controlled trade for particular items - came back into existence with the resurgence of trade after the Dark Ages in a wide variety of forms in European cities and towns in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. They were probably at their height around the time of the thirteenth century (Watson, 2017). Importantly, there were no nationally based professions as we know them today at this stage, although access to the classic learned occupations of divinity, law and medicine was open only to the elite who had entered very expensive university education in places like Oxford and Cambridge (Crook, 2008). As Brint (1994:112) points out, early professionalism in this sense was based on “technical expertise, service to clients based on a trust relationship, and gentlemanly status conferred by birth and higher education.”

The craft guilds were mainly based on establishing a local corporate economic monopoly for skilled artisans in areas such as baking and weaving and other aspects of daily life, although they were not always supported by the relevant local city and other authorities. They typically controlled everything from their associated raw materials to work procedures, with a stratified career hierarchy of master craftsman, journeyman and apprentice (Watson, 2017). The most successful guilds in these times established power and control in an interrelated manner over the association concerned, the workplace, the market and the state (Krause, 1996). In this context, they were based on self-government in a break from serfdom under a feudal economy and the power of the feudal lord, with guild control over the rules of entry, training, dues and disciplinary measures. As early industrial capitalism developed, such bodies established to ensure mutual aid, maintain production standards and reduce competition were led by guild masters from the richer middle class - who typically set ever higher membership fees for outsiders and enlisted jurors to adjudicate disputes amongst members (Cartwright, 2018).

Krause (1996), one of the foremost writers on the local guild power that existed before professionalisation took hold on a national basis, observes that turf battles often occurred between the male-dominated guilds in their struggle for control over territory. This potentially conflictual localised system was not generally established in the United States as this was a new society founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth century through settlement from Britain and elsewhere, along with the indigenous American population (Jenkins, 2012). However, pockets of guild activity are extant even today in occupational areas such as real estate and screen acting. Moreover, in England - as indeed in a number of centralised European countries like France - the establishment of guilds, and especially the richer guilds now known as livery companies, led to a quest for Royal Charters or wider state approval based on fee payment to give still greater competitive advantage.

Eventually, though, craft guilds in Europe for a plethora of diverse local occupational groups from retailers to milliners, sculptors and painters came under attack with the rise of industrial capitalism, as power was wrested from the aristocracy (Cartwright, 2018). It is stressed by Krause (1996) that guilds then came to have an anachronistic position as 'dead weights’ for the economy. This provided fertile ground for increased criticisms of guild power because they were seen as self-interestedly working in favour of their members, as well as some elite politicians who stood to benefit financially from the payments that they made to them - as opposed to working in the common interest. In their place, free trade arrangements increasingly emerged in the early capitalist industrial period, largely unaffected by the traditional restrictions of the guilds with the rise of the modern nation state. The retrogressive effect of the guilds with the rise of capitalism is particularly indicated by the entry in Box 2.1. This underlines that while, as we shall see, nationally based professions have been widely attacked by critics in the modern neo-liberal era, the guilds which preceded them were also not immune from criticism several centuries before.

Box 2.1 The negative effect of European guilds on economic growth

From her detailed, high-level research into the development of European guilds, Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie (2019), a Canadian economist and historian, argues that the stronger and less liberal the guilds, the more they slowed down economic growth from the fourteenth century onwards. To be sure, guilds have sometimes been seen as efficient institutions during their several hundred-year histories - not least by guaranteeing quality and skills. However, as Ogilvie emphasises, they less helpfully:

• • excluded competitors;
• • denied apprenticeships to outsiders;
• • discriminated against female and ethnic minorities;
• • manipulated markets;
• • drove up prices for consumers; and
• • blocked innovation.

In so doing, she highlights that guilds were mainly employer organisations out for themselves and not private bodies building trust and contributing to the good of civil society.

Source: Ogilvie, S. (2019) The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Epstein (1991) believes that, despite the demise of the guilds which had dominated most workplaces in Europe from the eleventh to the nineteenth century, one of the most important legacies was vocational education and the solidarity they evinced amongst employers and employees alike. As far as practitioners are concerned, this is a similar hallmark of the professional bodies that have since emerged in the Anglo-American context, with one caveat - they were not local, but national in scope. Krause (1996) also makes the point that the scholars’ guilds largely retained their power through universities which generated the learned professions. However, there was some international variation in the longevity of the guilds. In England, for example, he notes that active craft guilds faded from the mid-sixteenth century onwards in many regions, although they survived to the end of the eighteenth century in France and much later in Italy where there was a weaker central state to enforce economic conformity. Craft guilds even grew in power up to the mid-nineteenth century in Germany, characterised by the later development of capitalism and state centralisation.

Such guilds now have very largely died out in the modern world (Murphy, 1990), except in part in a popularly conceived symbolic sense as ‘dining clubs for the wealthy’. In this respect in Britain, for example, longstanding bodies such as the Merchant Tailors and Stationers’ Livery Companies still exist. They were descended from the guilds, although they now fulfil a much-reduced range of functions - mainly

History of professionalisation 21 including charity work and education (Gadd and Wallis, 2002). More recently founded guilds have come on the scene over the past few decades such as the Guild of Beauty Therapists and the Quilters’ Guild, which each have several thousand members, alongside the more extensively positioned Guild of Master Craftsmen providing, inter alia, marketing and insurance services for subscribers (Hoffman, 2011). These are very different from formalised professional bodies, but nonetheless provide a link with the past. So too does the wide range of technical and vocational qualifications that are delivered by the City & Guilds in London to develop skills, following its foundation in the late nineteenth century.

However, as Ogilvie (2019) points out, guilds hold a much greater contemporary significance in terms of our academic understanding of present-day institutions - not least because they provide insights into the effect of controlling markets economically through closure by the multi-stranded social networks on which they are based. These academic insights particularly apply to the monopolies they once so extensively created through restricted supply and higher pricing of services, which is of course very pertinent to the study of current-day professions. This relevance is underscored by the fact that the European guilds, which grew up from the eleventh century onwards, covered the production of many goods and services, including those provided by physicians, surgeons and other subsequently professionally anointed groups. This brings us back to the scholars’ guild as a precursor to the central role of the university today in professionalisation.

Krause (1996) notes that the early European university did not have a fixed location and was made up of masters and apprentices -with instruction in Latin in the stock areas of civil or canon law, medicine and theology. The professoriate and their middle and upper-middle-class students were based in centres like Bologna, Cambridge, Florence, Oxford and Paris. England, according to Krause, is a deviant case since groups like doctors and lawyers were initially trained largely outside the universities, directly in hospitals and at the Inns of Court in London, respectively. The position on the continent and in Scotland was that there was more continuity with the role of the university in the Middle Ages. The United States began with the English model, but by the mid-nineteenth century began following the continental European approach to which England was finally to revert, in which universities held power over membership and training for the professions. Such variations highlight the difficulty of assuming a unilinear model of professional development.