Over the past six months or so, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the process of professionalization.  In its simplest form, the process involves a set of tasks being “set aside” by a state organization and a monopoly on their practice being granted to a specific group - a “professional organization” - that has the sole right to licence individuals to practice those tasks in the jurisdiction of the state granting that monopoly.

For anyone who has studied the professions, this definition may seem a touch at odds with some of the standard definitions.  Well, the reason is fairly simple - I am using a definition derived from Andrew Abbott’s The System of the Professions (University of Chicago Press, 1988).  This differs from some other definitions which assume the existence of core “traits” and is pretty strongly in the neo-institutionalist tradition (see Laura Empson’s excellent encyclopedia entry on the concept of “profession”).

Part of the reason why I have been thinking about professionalization is personal.  Between the end of 2000 and mid-2003, I was working part time as a Senior Career Transition Counsellor involved in the high technology downsizings in Ottawa.  In some ways this wasn’t surprising, after all the specific focus of my Ph.D. research had been on the development of the Career Transition industry in Canada, and I had done a fair amount of informal counselling work for years.

What changed in 2003 was that in order to call yourself a “Career Transition Counsellor” in Ontario, you needed to have an MA in Education with a specialty in Counselling.  This put me in the intriguing position of having done the work (successfully I think), being able and licensed to teach people how to do the work (an advantage of the Ph.D.), but not being allowed to do it myself.

This experience highlighted, for me at least, the ability to perform a task and the licence to perform the same task, which is why I ended up drawing on Abbott’s work for my definition of professionalization.