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What exactly is a profession?

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A few occupations, mainly medical doctors, lawyers, professors, and clergy have always been thought of as professions. Other jobs are generally accepted as professions, such as psychiatry (although maybe that could be said to be a subset of being in the medical field). Many other groups have "professionalized" and people have begun to think of those jobs as among the professions, such as accountancy.

My question is what differentiates them from other fields? Is it having a professional body with a standard of ethics that they must agree to? What about those people, who, for example, are lawyers in other countries but don't swear some type of oath?

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Professionals are independent in that they collect payment for their services directly from their customers. In principle, an entire occupation is considered a profession if any one of them can make a living that way.

The professional bodies are just a guild mechanism to limit competition. The plumber's union is equivalent to American Bar Association in that respect.

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Professionals are independent in that they collect payment for their services directly from their customers. In principle, an entire occupation is considered a profession if any one of them can make a living that way.

But that is possible in absolutely every career (or probably most of them, but I briefly thought of a list of a large number of jobs). So why do lawyer, doctor, professor, and clergyman get special focus generally?

I've also never heard anyone define what a professional is similarly to you. That might be an adequate definition for "self-employed" though.

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Engineers are considered professionals as well. I think the biggest commonality I see is that they all have earned and accredited titles. Although I don't think id include clergyman with the rest as it does not fit with the others

What do you mean by accredited titles? Do you mean a government licence? Some countries lack such a licence.

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There is some historicism at work. Before technology, those were the original professions. They also required books and education, an expensive and rare commodity with social status attached to it.

Your definition, in which a person who sells his services directly to customers, fits nearly all careers, both past and present.

Also, there were many cases were lawyers were trained solely through apprenticeship. Even today, you can become a lawyer in several states in the US through apprenticeship without a law degree. Also, all other fields from the past required an education of some kind, although not always an education with books. However, being a poet, for example, would require an education with books.

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They require graduate school studies mostly is I guess what i meant. Most lawyers, doctors, and professors have doctorates. Professional engineer's get a license in their field. All require a large amount of education though

So the definition of "lawyer" is different in the US, than say, South Korea, where students study four years of a law undergraduate degree and then go to work? Also, please see my post about some states in the US not requiring a law degree.

If their unifying element is "requiring a graduate degree" (which you don't have to have to practice these fields adequately, you are simply required to legally in the US) then we have a definition based on the politics of today, in only certain countries.

Edited by ex_banana-eater
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So the definition of "lawyer" is different in the US, than say, South Korea, where students study four years of a law undergraduate degree and then go to work? Also, please see my post about some states in the US not requiring a law degree.

If their unifying element is "requiring a graduate degree" (which you don't have to have to practice these fields adequately, you are simply required to legally in the US) then we have a definition based on the politics of today, in only certain countries.

Merriam-Webster's relevant definition is: a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation.

To bolster fountainhead's post about earned/accredited professions, I was told in college that what makes a job a "profession" is whether there is an exam required to practice. However, that would make police officers professionals, but I don't think that's a definition many people would agree about.

As commonly used, it's a term for jobs that require a relatively large amount of formal education. It's a subjective definition - does three months of study for a real estate license qualify real estate as "professional"? - but reflects current usage.

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All of man's labour is mental in origin. The place to look first is in the nature of thought in relation to labour when trying to classify labour.

I would think that a more relevant marker of a profession is that professionals either do, or at least expected to be capable of, understanding, formulating and using abstractions at a deeper level than a non-professional. For example, a lawyer ought know about principles of justice in a broader sense as well as particular statutes and cases, an electical engineer ought know something about EMF physics and radio theory as well as be able to decide whether to use shielded or non-shielded cables in a given situation, and so on, as opposed to a policeman who generally follows procedures and protocols or an electrician who mostly engages in installs to conform to designs, and so on.

In the real world there is frequently no clear-cut division between who is a professional and who is not. The split between vocational schools and universities do reflect the distinction in focus, but there is nothing inherent in labour itself that mandates such a split. For example, a very experienced and intellectual electrician frequently knows much more of theory and design as well as practice than an electrical engineer fresh out of university with an undergraduate degree. While there are practical reasons behind two different school systems, any further identification of a distinction is elitism at work and not reality-based. However, this split is being artificially widened by the ever increasing encroachment of regulation in our lives. The increasing focus on exams and paperwork is coming at the expense of concern for experience (and in turn of common sense - I read recently of two women who got busted in the UK for "unlicensed childcare facilities"... because they took turns in looking after each others' kids and didn't have the necessary formal training and consequente peices of paper saying they had passed exams). Employment and work is becoming ever more bureacratised, and we're beginning to suffer because of it.

JJM

Edited by John McVey
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