Professionalism: The Golden Years

This paper presents a detailed exposition of professionalism, carefully situated within the social, theoretical, and temporal context of the decades immediately following World War II. This classic conception of professionalism involves three attributes—knowledge, organization, and the ethic of professional service. Such an approach presumes a functionalist view of society specific to the middle years of the Twentieth Century, a time characterized by a high degree of occupational specialization, shared norms and values, stability, and the tendency to maintain equilibrium in the presence of social change. A clear picture of this classic view of professionalism is the first step toward understanding the contemporary meaning of professionalism for today’s engineering education and practice issues.