For love or money? Commodification and the construction of an occupational mandate

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Dec, 1997  by Bonalyn J. Nelsen,  Stephen R. Barley

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Shifts in the occupational structure of society are potentially the most telling indicators of significant junctures in economic history. It would be hard to speak of the Second Industrial Revolution, for example, had not the modal form of work during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not shifted from farming to factory and clerical work. Similarly, arguments for the coming of a postindustrial economy rest largely on changes in the occupational division of labor, in particular, the steady decline of blue-collar work and the dramatic expansion of professional, technical, and managerial work (Touraine, 1971; Bell, 1973; Block, 1990). Because changes of this magnitude usually entail the creation of a cadre of new occupations (Barley, 1996), no question could be more central to the study of work than how new occupations arise and acquire jurisdictions from a macro-social perspective.

Most of what sociologists have written about how occupations acquire jurisdictions appears in the literature on the professions (see Freidson, 1970; Elliott, 1972; Larson, 1979; Abbott, 1988). Although theorists differ on the importance of the various strategies that occupations can employ in their quest, most highlight one or more of the following;. founding an occupational association, linking practice to formal knowledge, developing a system for training recruits, acquiring the right to self-discipline, and securing legal authority to license and credential practitioners. What goes unsaid in such discussions is that two conditions must be met before an occupation can construct institutional supports such as these. First, there must exist a group of practitioners who are sufficiently self-conscious to pursue collective action. Second, and more easily overlooked, members of the culture must acknowledge an activity as a form of work before anyone can meaningfully contest who shall perform it. At least in modern Western cultures, acknowledging an activity as a form of work means that it must be seen as worthy of remuneration and, hence, viewed as neither a form of leisure nor a duty tied to what the culture construes as a nonwork role, such as being a member of a family or a community. Both conditions arise from complex social processes that begin early in an occupation's history. Because tales of professionalization usually begin an occupation's story in its adolescence, long after such processes have begun, they are, to borrow a term from population ecology, "left-censored" tales.

The left-censoring of occupational theory attests, in part, to the difficulties of studying occupations. Compared with organizations, occupations arise diffusely. Organizations are intentionally formed by specific people at specific times and places. Because the legal system recognizes organizations as actors with definite rights and duties (Coleman, 1974), an organization's existence is usually registered with an appropriate authority shortly after its founding. Once organizations are registered, researchers can identify and track them. And while events leading up to an organization's founding may remain obscure, because researchers can identify founders, they can at least hope to reconstruct early events through interviews.

In contrast, an occupation's first practitioners are usually distributed across many locales, are often unaware of each other's existence, and may not even consider themselves to be occupational pioneers. Because no authority registers occupations, social and legal recognition come more gradually to occupations than to organizations. In fact, social recognition usually precedes legal recognition, whereas for organizations the sequence is reversed. Finally, because occupational pioneers often remain anonymous, they are difficult to identify, much less interview. By the time researchers realize a new occupation has formed, its early practitioners may have been lost to history. These hurdles are evident in the fact that organizational theorists routinely speak of an organization's "birth," but the most an occupational sociologist can usually say is that an occupation has "emerged." Epistemic difficulties, however, are not solely responsible for the left-censoring of occupational history. The tendency for theorists to privilege institutional over interactional stories of how practitioners construct, maintain, and challenge occupational jurisdictions is also to blame. Studies of encounters between professionals and clients and between professionals and paraprofessionals indicate that rhetorics, interactions, and other everyday behaviors are crucial for sustaining the jurisdictional boundaries of even well-established professions (Emerson, 1970; Hosticka, 1979; Anderson and Helm, 1979; Barley, 1986); Yet aside from occasional references to the acts of highly visible historical figures or groups, most tales of how occupations acquire jurisdictions revolve around institutional supports (such as the founding of training programs or the enactment of legislation) rather than patterns of situated action, interaction, and interpretation, what Goffman (1983) called an interaction order. To the degree that theories of occupational jurisdiction emphasize institutional supports over interaction orders, they risk truncating and even misspecifying developmental trajectories by putting the cart before the horse.