Year: 1957
Type: article
Abstract: how it could get along without basic structural changes if they were seriously impaired*3 From the perspective of a comparative-historical study of the major civilizations, the status and development of the professions in modern society are, as Parsons has ob served, "unique in history," The professions are, together with business occupations, typical, characteristic, distinctive features of modern society.However, for various reasons, the significance of the professions has been overlooked by historians and economists,4 It is also paradoxical that the professions do not occupy an important place in either of the great competing economic ideologies of our time, i,e, capitalism or socialism, including the communist variety,3 Shifting our attention to recent historical trends in American society, the professions appear to have been in creasing in importance, and some observers confidently pre dict they will continue to do so.Utilizing Hatt's situs classification of occupations, Foote and Hatt examined labor force data for 1910 and 1940, and concluded that: "pro fessional occupations show the greatest relative expansion, 3Parsons, Talcott, "The Professions and Social Structure," in Essays in Sociological Theory, Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1954, p, 34, 4Ibid,, pp.35-43, 3Parsons, Talcott, "A Sociologist Looks at the Legal Profession," in Essays in Sociological Theory, 1954, p, 371, 4 with intellectual, amusement and recreation functions almost equally expanding," Although all of the occupations in these two situses showed net growth, there has been greater expansion in occupations associated with the sciences and the arts than in those associated with the classical "facul ties" of law, medicine, and theology,® The expansion of the professions takes on added sig nificance if it is seen as correlated with, or reflective of, other trends in the American economy: (1) professional ization of all industries, even those employing primarily manual labor(e,g, farming, manufacturing), (2) net movement of the labor force from the primary and secondary industries into the tertiary, quaternary, and quinary industries,1 ^ (3) the increasing importance of education in the assignment of prestige and occupational position, (4) general economic ®Foote and Hatt, 0£, cit, , pp, 374,376, ^Primary industries--farming, forestry, fishing, and mining; secondary industries--manufacturing; tertiary industries--domestic services and quasi-domestic services(e,g, hotels, restaurants, barber and beauty shops, repairing and maintenance, laundry and cleaning, handcrafts); quaternary industries--
Author: Warren Edward James
Institution: The Ohio State University
Language: English
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2799732637