The Rise of Professionalism

The Rise of Professionalism offers a penetrating reconstruction of how “the professions” emerged as distinctive power formations in modern capitalist societies. Magali Sarfatti Larson dismantles functionalist and ideal-typical accounts that naturalize professional prestige by invoking disinterested service and esoteric knowledge. Drawing on Freidson’s practice-centered sociology and Gramsci’s theory of intellectuals, Larson reframes professionalization as a historical project: the collective construction of market shelter and social closure that translates scarce expertise into monopoly rents, jurisdictional control, and middle-class status. Through a comparative analysis centered on England and the United States—the “purer” laboratories of laissez-faire—she traces how associations, credentialing systems, and claims to autonomy were negotiated with state and elite patrons, how educational institutions became engines of stratification, and why self-regulation insulates professions while binding them to political authority. By distinguishing market control from collective mobility—and showing how they converge in the organization of knowledge and the regulation of entry—Larson provides a general model that travels across law and medicine to aspiring occupations while excluding nonmarket corps (military, clergy).

Equally important is the book’s long view of structural change. Larson shows how the liberal-capitalist figure of the free practitioner gives way to the salaried specialist in corporate and bureaucratic settings, even as the professional ideal persists—and hardens—into an ideology that legitimates inequality and occupational closure. Case materials, historical synthesis, and theoretical argument cohere into a powerful explanation of why professionals resist union identities, how client status reciprocally stratifies practitioners, and what happens to professional authority under “revolutionary” social change. Essential for scholars of stratification, labor and occupations, sociology of knowledge, STS, policy and higher education, and historians of medicine, law, and engineering, The Rise of Professionalism remains the canonical sociological analysis of how expertise becomes property—and why that settlement continues to organize the contemporary social order.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.