Professionalism

“In America, the universities became the central arbiters of professional status during the era of collective mobility [late 19th- and early 20th-century]. Aspiring occupations acquired professional status primarily by gaining a place in the regular curricular offerings of universities. They did so by persuading the universities that the tasks involved in their work required training in a formal body of knowledge, knowledge that was, furthermore, relevant to the performance of important services for individual clients or organizational employers. . . . The key to acceptance as a profession during the period of ‘collective mobility’ was a successful claim to testable expertise on the basis of formal knowledge, combined with the successful claim to social status arising from the conviction of an occupation’s ‘respectability’ and social importance. These are rather vague criteria, and therefore it is not surprising that formal university-level training became the authoritative guide to the boundaries of the professional world. For all intents and purposes, it is the universities that define the professions” (Brint, 34, 35).