The Rise of Professionalism

The particular relation that professionalism bears to individualism and to the subjective illusion deserves to be noted. Their special competence empowers professionals and experts to act in situations where laymen feel incompetent or baffled. In fact, the assumption by the public that the expert is competent creates a sort of pragmatic compulsion for the expert: to certify his worth in the eyes of the laity, he must act. Deferentially requested to intervene by his clients, the expert practitioner is compelled to do something; from this point of view, anything is better than nothing. As Freidson remarks: "Indeed, so impressed is he by the perplexity of his clients and by his apparent capacity to deal with those perplexities, that the practitioner comes to consider himself an expert not only in the problems he is trained to deal with but in all human problems." Most particularly in the personal professions, the behavior of the expert asserts, ideologically, that a variety of ills—and, in particular, those that can most affect the person—have individual remedies. This reinforces the optimistic illusion of ideological individualism: personal problems of all kinds are purely private and admit, as such, individual and ad hoc solutions. In the predominant ideological way of addressing social issues and social relations experienced by individuals, therefore, structural causes, as well as collective action upon those causes, are relegated to a vaguely utopian realm. At the same time, the practitioner's "compulsion to act" reiterates to the layman that education confers superior powers upon the individual and superior mastery over physical and social environments.