Influence and Authority Among Physicians in an Outpatient Clinic

This analysis has been limited to a discussion of some structural requirements for attitudinal and behavioral conformity. A typology of kind presented here, possibly including more than three structural variables, might furnish a convenient model for study of social control in bureaucratic organizations, in professions and other occupations. For professions and occupations furnish opportunity to study, in a socially delimited area, problems pertaining to society in general. Work . . . is in all human societies an object of moral rule, of social control in broadest sense, and it is precisely all processes involved in definition and enforcement of moral rules that form core problem of sociology. 43 What we can legitimately hide and what we can legitimately reveal to those with whom we work and with whom we share tasks and team-belongingness teaches us much about more general social dialectic of privacy and access. In every society, the right to question must be allowed to be limited by right to secrecy. 44 Occupations and professions form an ideal ground on which intersections of these two rights can be studied in their crystallization in work rules and role prescriptions. The determination of who can hide from whom may be as essential to workings of a social system as determination of who has power over whom.