Continental Sociology of Professions Today: Conceptual Contributions

Continental sociologists did not contribute to the sociology of professions until the 1980s in part because no continental language developed indigenously a synonym for profession. Today, however, some continental sociologists are contributing to this literature, but they are inadvertently recapitulating within it the theories and concepts that for decades were applied to the middle classes more generally. This article explores why these theories and concepts revolve around cultural and social psychological variables, and why they neglect invariant structural qualities. The article concludes by proposing schematically a structural and institutional turn in the study of professions that distinguishes professions from middle-class occupations and reveals the consequences that professions uniquely introduced into civil society.