Three Lenses on Occupations and Professions in Organizations: Becoming, Doing, and Relating

Abstract

Management and organizational scholarship is overdue for a reappraisal of occupations and professions as well as a critical review of past and current work on the topic. Indeed, the field has largely failed to keep pace with the rising salience of occupational and professional (as opposed to organizational) dynamics in work life. Moreover, not only is there a dearth of studies that explicitly take occupational or professional categories into account, but there is also an absence of a shared analytical framework for understanding what occupations and professions entail. Our goal is therefore two-fold: first, to offer guidance to scholars less familiar with this terrain who encounter occupational or professional dynamics in their own inquiries and, second, to introduce a three-part framework for conceptualizing occupations and professions to help guide future inquiries. We suggest that occupations and professions can be understood through lenses of “becoming”, “doing”, and “relating”. We develop this framework as we review past literature and discuss the implications of each approach for future research and, more broadly, for the field of management and organizational theory.

Acknowledgements

We thank Elizabeth George and Sim Sitkin for their helpful editorial guidance. We are also very grateful to Ruthanne Huising, Kate Kellogg, András Tilcsik, and John Van Maanen for their reactions to drafts of this article as well as to Caitlin Anderson for initial assistance in locating references.

ORCID

Michel Anteby http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2629-2529

Notes

1. There are multiple perspectives on what professions entail. A structural approach to professions, exemplified by the work of Greenwood (1957) and Goode (1957), “points to a series of static characteristics possessed by the professions and lacking in the non-professions” (Ritzer, 1975, p. 630). A process approach, represented by scholars like Caplow (1954) and Wilensky (1964), focuses on a series of historical stages through which an occupation must pass through en route to becoming a profession. A power perspective, illustrated by Freidson (1970), suggests that professions are occupations that have achieved a monopoly over their work tasks. In this view, a profession achieves such monopoly by developing a “market project” (Larson, 1979) to carve-out a “shelter”, “a social closure”, or “sinecure” for its members (Freidson, 1988, p. 59), thereby “convincing the state and the lay public that they need, and deserve, such a right” to monopoly (Ritzer, 1975, p. 630). An ecological perspective, pioneered by Abbott (1988a), suggests that professions exist in a system in which various professions contend for jurisdiction over tasks. Notably, however, Abbott (1988a, p. 315) writes, “I have used the word ‘profession’ very loosely, and have largely ignored the issue of when groups can legitimately be said to have coalesced into professions”.