Abstract:The paper highlights the importance of resurrecting the debate about how to define a profession. The drive to define a profession is traced back to the taxonomic approach -encompassing the work of trait and functionalist writers -in which professions were seen as possessing unique and positive characteristics, including distinctive knowledge and expertise. A range of critical challenges to this approach are then considered, particularly as they relate to the role of knowledge and expertise in defining a profession, covering interactionism, Marxism, Foucauldianism and discourse analysis. However, the most effective challenge to the taxonomic approach is considered to be the neo-Weberian perspective based on a less broadly assumptive and more analytically useful definition of a profession centered on exclusionary closure. With reference to case studies, the relative merits of neo-Weberianism compared to taxonomic and other approaches are examined in relation to the role of knowledge and expertise and delineating professional boundaries.

The rapidly growing numbers and influence of both professional organisations and professional personnel in the industrialised world in general and Western capitalist societies in particular has been noted and documented more times than the author would care to recount. * Yet, although such claims have come to assume the status of mere sociological platitudes, it remains that they continue to raise crucial questions about the nature and role of professions in modern society. These questions have been tackled from a shifting and diverse range of theoretical frameworks over the past few decades within the sociology of professions. The'main purpose of the paper, though, is to examine critically the most recent Anglo-American contributions to the debate-focusing especially on those deriving from neo-Weberian and Marxist writers whose perspectives have come to dominate the field. In short, it will be argued that, while such contributors have advanced the broader study of the professions in significant respects, they have so far failed to transcend the most central limitations of the traditional taxonomic orthodoxy which they have, for the most part, supplanted. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to how more fruitful work might be produced in this important area of sociological research. Of necessity, however, the discussion begins with a brief consideration of the main features of the taxonomic apptOAcYi, the primary criticisms to which it has been subjected and the initial development of a more sceptical orientation to the analysis of professions in sociology through the unlikely vehicle of symbolic interaaionism. This is fairly well trodden ground but it is only against this background that the recent neo-Weberian and Marxist contributions can be fully evaluated.© RKP 1983 0038-0261/83/3101-0001 $1.50 Mike SaksFriednvui, Kuznets, Kessell and Lees, '^ all of whom highlighted the dangers of professional monopolies. This plainly raises the quesdon of the origin of the recent development of the more cridcal, alternadve perspectives which have come to predominate in the sociology of professions. Ironically, most of the contemporary neo-Weberian and Marxist literature on the nature and role of the professions seems to have taken its lead in the 1950s and early 1960s from symbolic interacdonism-a school of thought normally associated with micro-sociological endeavours and frequently castigated for concentradng on issues of a socialpsychological kind in face of the broad spectrum of problems arising from changes in the occupadonal structure at this time.'' But although there may have been an excessively narrow focus on such matters as professional role conflia and socialisadon in this period, Everett Hughes and Howard Becker were nonetheless instrumental in providing the conceptual tools for evaluadng many of the glib trait and functionalist assumptions about the professions-even if these were ultimately found wanting. Hughes, with his interest in the social drama of work, refused to accept at face value the image ...

This paper makes the case for the neo-Weberian approach for analyzing the professions. It starts by reviewing the difficulties of other main approaches to the sociology of professions ‐ including the trait approach, functionalism, interactionism, Marxism and Foucauldianism. It is argued that the issues they pose are largely addressed by the neo-Weberian approach, the key features of which are outlined and illustrated with reference to the pivotal case of health care. The neo-Weberian approach itself is then critically evaluated. The paper concludes that, despite the recent emergence of a broader approach to analyzing occupational groups centred on the discourse of professionalism, the neo-Weberian approach remains the most incisive and empirically fruitful perspective on the sociology of professions.

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This paper examines the neglected area of health support work in the United Kingdom in the context of recent social policy and studies of professionalisation. A variety of socioeconomic trends have led policy makers to give greater consideration to this section of the healthcare workforce. Professional regulatory issues and recent reviews in the health field have provided the leverage to alter existing healthcare boundaries, as well as to enhance public protection. Drawing on commissioned research, it is argued that health support workers are not only an important area of study in their own right, but also raise interesting questions about the broader process of health policy making and professionalisation.