Meslek Sosyolojisinde Teorik Yaklaşımlar
Elyesa KoytakTürkiye’de meslek sosyolojisi son on yılda gelişen bir alan olarak henüz teorik ve kavramsal bir zemine sahip değildir. Bu makalenin amacı Durkheim ve Weber’den bugüne sosyoloji külliyatında meslek olgusuna dair geliştirilen teorik yaklaşımları eleştirel bir şekilde değerlendirip tasnif etmektir. Meslek olgusu farklı dönemlerde ve farklı ulusal bağlamlarda değişen açılardan ele alınmış ve tanımlanmıştır. Bilhassa DurkheimcıFlexnercı bir çerçeve geliştiren işlevselci meslek tanımı 1970’lere kadar etkili olmuştur. Batı toplumlarında yaygın şekilde kullanılan profession tabiri, avukatlık ve hekimlik gibi 19. yüzyıldan bu yana yüksek gelir, statü ve imtiyaz ifade eden işleri model alan bu geleneğin mirasıdır. Meslek olgusu bu çerçevede bir tür ahlak ve denge mekanizması olarak düşünülmüş; bu da bir özellikler seti olarak tanımlanmasını beraberinde getirmiştir. Alternatif olarak profesyonelleşme ve meslek aşınması kavramları mesleği süreç olarak düşünmeyi teklif etmiştir. 1970’lerden itibaren çatışma, mücadele ve iktidar mefhumlarını merkeze alan Weberci ve Marksist yaklaşımlar alana girmiş ve eleştirel, şüpheci ve ilişkisel bir bakış gelişmiştir. Meslekî kapanma ve tekel, proleterleşme, çatışma ve iktidar alanı olarak meslek gibi mefhumlar son otuz yılda yaygınlaşmıştır. Bununla birlikte farklı tarihsel tecrübelere dair çalışmalar arttıkça meslek anlamında profession kavramına dair tashih ihtiyacı da belirginleşmektedir.
Theoretical Approaches in the Sociology of Professions
Elyesa KoytakThe sociology of professions as a developing field in the last decade in Turkey does not yet have a theoretical and conceptual ground. This article aims to critically evaluate and classify the theoretical approaches developed to understand professions in the sociology literature since Durkheim and Weber. In sociology, professions have been analyzed from different perspectives that vary according to different national contexts and periods. The functionalist definition of professions which is rooted in Durkheimian-Flexnerian framework in particular has been dominant until the 1970s. The term profession is a legacy of this tradition which took as a universal model prestigious jobs such as the lawyer and physician that have designated a high status and high income in Western societies since the 19th century. In this framework, professions are considered as sets of traits and attributes that are convenient to function as moral balance mechanisms. Alternatively, the concepts of professionalization and deprofessionalization offer to reconsider the established professions as dynamic processes rather than abstracted models. Since the 1970s, Weberian and Marxist approaches that emphasize conflict, struggle and power rather than harmony, have entered the field and fostered critical, skeptical and relational perspectives. Notions such as professional closure and monopoly, proletarianization, and field of power have become widespread in the last thirty years. In addition, as studies on different historical experiences increase, the need for a fundamental revision of the concept profession becomes indispensable.
The sociology of professions as a developing field in the last decade in Turkey does not yet have a theoretical and conceptual ground. This article aims to critically evaluate the theoretical approaches developed to understand professions in the sociology literature since Durkheim and Weber. The theoretical spectrum which is classified here shows that Durkheimian and functionalist approaches were dominant in the literature until the 1960’s. The term profession is a legacy of this tradition which took as universal model prestigious jobs such as the lawyer and physician that have designated a high status and high income in Western societies since the 19th century. Since the 1970s, Weberian and Marxist approaches that emphasize conflict, struggle and power rather than harmony, have entered the field and fostered critical, skeptical and relational perspectives. Notions such as professional closure, monopoly, proletarianization, and field of power have become widespread in the last thirty years.
Émile Durkheim described professions as moral communities (1986). For him, the industrialized European society witnessed the collision of “individual appetites” and “anarchic competition” as the state, religion and family lost their traditional regulatory power (p. 16). As a solution, professional morality should reinforce collective ethics that society lacks, since the ethical conduct that professions are rooted in require autonomy from industry and trade. This Durkheimian point of departure led also British social scientists from LSE of the same period to define profession and professionalism in contrast with the economic pursuit of profit (Carr-Saunders & Wilson, 1933; Marshall, 1939; Tawney, 1920). In the USA, Talcott Parsons inherited that perspective with one essential change: for him, the fundamental attribute of professions was not the altruistic ethical code but the technical competence which should be rooted in scientific universalism as it is seen in modern physicians (Parsons, 1939, p. 458). Therefore, most American sociologists strove to determine the true attributes and traits of an established profession (Barber, 1963; Goode, 1957; Greenwood, 1957). In fact, the functionalist moment in the literature was heavily influenced by Abraham Flexner’s medical reform and definition of professionalism (Flexner, 1910, 2001).
The concepts of professionalization and deprofessionalization were developed in the late 60’s by sociologists who preferred to describe professions as a process of institutionalization (Haug, 1973; Toren, 1975; Wilensky, 1964). However, it is only by the adaptation of the Weberian sociology of religion that a totally new conceptual schema was developed in the 1970’s. To see professions as social closure groups and monopoly holders is Max Weber’s main approach to any kind of hierocratic social closure (Weber, 1978, p. 304). For him, the shift from sorcerer to clergy is the archetype for professions as it contains systematic esoteric knowledge forbidden to the layman, institutional authority apart from political actors, established formal education, full time work regime, a mass of client and an internal symbolic economy (Ritzer, 1975, p. 631). Accordingly, Neo-Weberian studies of professions have mainly focused on the exclusionary development of modern medicine in the US and UK (Allsop & Saks, 2003; Berlant, 1975; Freidson, 1970; Larkin, 1983; Larson, 1977; Parry & Parry, 1976; Saks, 2015). Another focus of Neo-Weberian studies has been the legal professions (Burrage, 2006; Halliday, 1987; Rogowski, 1995). The other theoretical framework that has been developed since the 1970’s is the Neo-Marxist approach which introduced the concept of proletarianization, and recently precarity, to the sociology of professions in order to locate the issue in the class system of modern capitalism (Braverman, 1974; Coburn, 1994; Derber, 1983; Larson, 1980; McKinlay & Arches, 1985; Navarro, 1988; Oppenheimer, 1972).
The history of considering professions as fields of conflict and struggle goes back to the 1960’s. Rue Bucher and Anselm Strauss (1961) attacked the idea that professions are a harmonious unity based on altruism and ethical conduct. Even the medical professions are battlefields on which different classes and groups clash for the monopoly of legitimacy. Similarly, Terence Johnson determines three types of professional control: collegiate, patronage and mediative (1972b). Andrew Abbott creates a dynamic framework to study inter-professional and intra-professional boundary relations as a system (1988). Finally, Pierre Bourdieu offers a new concept, field, to critically study professions as fields of struggle for domination between groups of different capitals (Bourdieu, 1986, 2000). Today, the sociology of professions is a domain of various empirical studies and theoretical lines (Adams, 2015; Faulconbridge & Muzio, 2012; Liljegren & Saks, 2017; Saks, 2016; Suddaby & Muzio, 2015; Susskind & Susskind, 2015). However, from Everett Hughes to Julia Evetts, conceptual discussions and objections about the term profession reveal that a radical terminological correction is required (Becker, 1970; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2016, p. 247; Evetts, 1999, 2003; Habenstein, 1963; Hughes, 1958; J. A. Roth, 1974).
