{"id":165627,"date":"2025-12-22T17:47:52","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T01:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=165627"},"modified":"2025-12-25T18:33:35","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T02:33:35","slug":"the-credential-society-an-historical-sociology-of-education-and-stratification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=165627","title":{"rendered":"The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification"},"content":{"rendered":"

Randall Collins writes in this 1979 book<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* A better explanation of professionals\u2019 altruistic codes of ethics is that they are defenses against the potential distrust of their clients (Wilensky, 1964).5 An occupation that monopolizes an important skill and reserves the right to judge its success or failure can provoke considerable antipathy among those who depend on it. When the doctor or the lawyer is called in, the client is usually helpless and distraught. Moreover, the outcome is often in doubt, even with the best of skilled performance; the disease may be incurable, the case may be unwinnable. In order to protect themselves against the anger of unsatisfied clients (or their surviving relatives), the occupational groups profess strict standards and enforce them against practitioners who bring the entire group into disrepute. As Zilboorg (1941) puts it, it was the public who created the Hippocratic Oath rather than the doctors themselves. There is great variation in how much the self-interest of professionals requires them to enforce their code of ethics and with what emphases. Codes of ethics among lawyers and doctors serve quite well to reinforce a restrictive club based on genteel manners, to prevent competition, and thereby to keep fees high. The introduction of stringent ethical standards among professionals has always resulted in an improvement of their economic and social position and a restriction of access to their ranks.<\/p>\n

Perhaps some individuals have gone through their careers guided subjectively by noble ideals. Some professionals, such as medical missionaries, have not been much interested in wealth. But it is a mistake to explain people\u2019s behavior simply in terms of their own interpretations of it, or to exempt their subjective ideals from sociological explanation. Esteem is a goal like any other. Usually it goes along with a desire for power, especially over the reality-constructing activities of other people\u2019s minds. Medical missionaries have been the imposers of self-satisfied Western culture upon weaker societies, and of Western political dominance as well. We would do well to recall that altruism as an ideal emerged with the rise of organized priesthoods, claiming to speak in the name of the community; at the same time, these priesthoods have been major factors in the history of political struggles. Altruism per se is just as much a part of the conflicts that make up most of history as violence and property.<\/p>\n

* Along with engineering, medicine is one of the few professions in which it is clear that there is an objective technical skill built upon general principles that can be taught. Medical education is often taken as the epitome of valid technical education, and the related professional monopoly over technical skill seems to be the clearest case of a functionally enforced restriction. If the social organization of power and status are found to be important in shaping the medical profession and medical education, they must a fortiori be so in other occupations and forms of education. That such social conditions are involved may be guessed from the fact that medical doctors have the highest social status and are consistently drawn from the highest social class backgrounds of any major occupation in industrial society. Reforms to raise the technical level of medical training have strengthened rather than weakened these patterns. Modern medicine is one of the most technically skilled of occupations, yet it shows the ambiguities of a purely technical explanation of its social positions and emphasizes the necessity of understanding technical skills and education within a larger context of stratification processes.<\/p>\n

* What is striking about the traditionally high status of medicine is the fact that it was based on virtually no valid expertise at all.<\/p>\n

* The monopoly position and high standing of physicians before the late nineteenth century, insofar as it was based on claims to actually cure illness and alleviate suffering, was based on fraud. Indeed, whatever practical skill was available was more likely to be found among surgeons and apothecaries than among the elite physicians (Reader, 1966: 31\u201340). Yet the latter enjoyed not only genteel status, but also lucrative incomes from wealthy patients. Doctors were rewarded for their ritual activities of making a show of power over unknown ills and therefore providing some psychological comfort to patients. The monopolistic organization and the classical learning of the medical profession were simply status-giving accouterments of a guild of priests. Since doctors appeared in emergency situations when patients were most fearful and in need of comfort, they found it crucial to allay fears about their benevolence by emphasizing an ideology of altruism. In England, this was done by such practices as prohibiting holders of medical licenses from suing to collect fees.It was also desirable for doctors to appear as social equals of their most preferred\u2014the wealthiest\u2014clients. Hence they emphasized a genteel rather than a mercenary lifestyle, a classical education, and a monopoly organization designed to keep out the nongenteel. Because of these requirements, even medieval doctors were drawn from the wealthier classes; successful practice necessitated spending a great deal on living in a style that would attract the proper sort of patients.<\/p>\n

* Even more explicitly than the AMA, the elite legal profession thus organized itself through the cultural and political mobilization of the late nineteenth-century ethnic crisis. The bar associations were Anglo-Protestant; the \u201ccorrupt\u201d lawyers were largely ethnic or the representatives of ethnic enterprises. The concept of \u201ccorruption\u201d itself is only the definition imposed on the situation by Anglo-Protestant values; the illegal or immoral activities protected by the political machines were the gambling, sports, prostitution, saloons, and riotous entertainment favored by immigrant and working-class culture.<\/p>\n

* Western medicine branched off from the religious studies of the medieval university, and for a long period doctors were a special type of clergyman.22 Pursuing the medical tradition back to antiquity, we find the religious cult of the followers of the demigod, Hippocrates; behind this is the tradition of the shaman, a role from which medicine, divination, and priestcraft all developed. Physicians thus have an unbroken tradition of emphasizing ritual exclusion for the purposes of occupational impressiveness. Lawyers come from a more secular tradition, although the monopoly of the church over medieval education gave European lawyers their first resources toward a powerful group status. Medicine and law both acquired their core occupational cultures in the Middle Ages, based on the experience of literate groups with access to traditional texts, in a society in which the ruling aristocracy was illiterate. The modern organization of elite doctors emerged as the university-trained group that specialized in ritually treating the wealthy aristocrats in times of illness; lawyers emerged as the group that specialized in oral arguments and written texts surrounding government administration, first of all in the area of justice.These occupations emerged with high-status cultures, both by virtue of their original access to the sacred books and institutional charisma of religious education and by virtue of their association with an upper-class clientele. In contrast, engineers have a dual occupational origin: the all-around skills of the gentleman-entrepreneur or administrator, and the technical lore of skilled laborers. Neither had any religious sanction, although the former was connected with the gentry class (nevertheless, in the prevailing tone of aristocratic society, engineering was not considered to be a very honored side of its activities). The skilled laborer side of engineering proved an even more serious embarrassment. Medicine actually has had a parallel plebeian group, that is, pharmacists, midwives, and barber-surgeons\u2014indeed, all those who had some actual practical skills rather than mere Galenic theory. But the very capacity of the book-trained elite to define themselves as alone \u201cpracticing medicine\u201d is an indication of the power of their ritual resources, above all in its influence upon the licensing power of the state. By comparison, engineers\u2019 cultural heritage has always contained an ambiguity based on the difficulty in separating its two internal components, and hence their ability to act as a cohesive group in support of their interests was much lower. Engineers thus turn out to be the most occupationally assimilative of any profession: Its higher-level segment tends to merge with that of managers in general, its lower group into the class of skilled workmen.<\/p>\n

Moreover, engineers have an ironic weakness in comparison with doctors and lawyers. The strongest cultural resources for the formation of a dominant group are those that involve a great deal of ritual impressiveness, especially in situations of high emotional stress. Engineers, however, deal with relatively uncontroversial and unemotional tasks, and hence lack a culture that is politically and morally impressive. Even more ironically, engineers and technicians suffer from the very successfulness of their techniques. The outcomes of their work are quite reliable, and hence even though outsiders may not always be able to judge the processes by which they work, they can control such technical employees by fairly simple judgments of work completed. The strength of doctors and lawyers vis-\u00e0-vis their clients, on the other hand, is precisely in the fact that their cures or legal maneuvers are not necessarily efficacious, and hence they are held much less accountable for their failures. Engineers\u2019 and technicians\u2019 work is productive labor; that of doctors and lawyers is primarily political labor. The one produces real outcomes; the other tends to manipulate appearances and beliefs. It is the very reliability of the productive realm that makes it relatively unrewarding, even for its most skilled practitioners, compared to the unpredictability and mystification of the political realm.<\/p>\n

* Politics is crucial for the survival and prosperity of professions, above all through the power of the state in licensing their monopolies. Lawyers are in a particularly good position, since they are tied to the state more intimately than any other occupation except government employees and politicians. But the power of these latter groups is mediated by other interest groups outside the state, whereas lawyers claim to be esoteric specialists in the mediation process itself. Lawyers have the resources to perpetuate their distinctive culture, their apparently intrinsic skills; in the medieval tradition, this has meant to keep the procedures of legal argument and decision so complex and esoteric as to monopolize the channels of communication with judicial powers.24By the same token, the strength of the legal guild is immediately affected by changes in the structure of political power. In medieval Europe, decentralized conditions favoring and institutionalizing the powers of the independent aristocracy vis-\u00e0-vis the king\u2014including the archaic institution of the collegial courts themselves\u2014made the lawyers a self-perpetuating status group. In contrast, the profession did not emerge at all in the long-centralized state of China, where laws remained part of the diffuse culture of all educated officials. Similarly, the rise of strong centralized bureaucracies to administer the continental European states tended to assimilate lawyers to the category of governmental administrators in general. In England, on the other hand, the balanced struggle between aristocracy and crown gave the lawyers, as intermediaries, many opportunities to elaborate the distinctiveness of their occupational culture (the Common Law) and the scope of their powers. The decentralization of government in America favored the continuation of this structure, although westward expansion in the nineteenth century and political democratization for a time diluted the occupational culture and threatened to assimilate the occupation to the larger politically mobilized populace generally. But the struggle against alien immigrant groups and the rise of the large, nationally centralized corporations toward the end of the century began to turn back this tide, giving elite lawyers other power resources and helping reestablish the balance between centralized and decentralized authority that most favors the power of lawyers.<\/p>\n

With regard to the status of engineers, the increased economic significance of their skills in contributing to industrialization has continued to be offset by the split between the managerial and skilled labor aspects of the profession. Where political conditions have favored the former, the result has been an elite profession, as in the successful opposition of technically trained French administrators to the nonpractical aristocrats of the Old Regime. <\/p>\n

* By the same token, the strength of the legal guild is immediately affected by changes in the structure of political power. In medieval Europe, decentralized conditions favoring and institutionalizing the powers of the independent aristocracy vis-\u00e0-vis the king\u2014including the archaic institution of the collegial courts themselves\u2014made the lawyers a self-perpetuating status group. In contrast, the profession did not emerge at all in the long-centralized state of China, where laws remained part of the diffuse culture of all educated officials. Similarly, the rise of strong centralized bureaucracies to administer the continental European states tended to assimilate lawyers to the category of governmental administrators in general. In England, on the other hand, the balanced struggle between aristocracy and crown gave the lawyers, as intermediaries, many opportunities to elaborate the distinctiveness of their occupational culture (the Common Law) and the scope of their powers. The decentralization of government in America favored the continuation of this structure, although westward expansion in the nineteenth century and political democratization for a time diluted the occupational culture and threatened to assimilate the occupation to the larger politically mobilized populace generally. But the struggle against alien immigrant groups and the rise of the large, nationally centralized corporations toward the end of the century began to turn back this tide, giving elite lawyers other power resources and helping reestablish the balance between centralized and decentralized authority that most favors the power of lawyers.<\/p>\n

* Most American government activity toward business has consisted of granting various rights for private self-regulation and appropriation of opportunities. On the local level, this takes the form of granting licenses and franchises to operate liquor stores or taverns, legal, medical and quasi-medical services, repair services, construction, crafts, insurance, real estate brokerages, banks, and other financial institutions. Although much of this has not been investigated in detail, we can surmise from studies of professions that the rhetoric of \u201cprotecting the public interest\u201d that has justified this regulatory activity is mainly a dissimulative ideology, and that the activity serves the economic interests of the groups involved. For the \u201cregulated\u201d group (which usually is delegated the power of self-regulation by its most formally organized sector), this means monopolization of a particular area of business, reduction of competition, and often a form of price fixing. For the politicians who pass such legislation, there are payoffs in the form of having created an area of patronage under their disposal, often involving quasi-legal or illegal contributions (or at least political support) to procure licenses. Insofar as such regulative activities are sponsored more heavily by liberal politicians, it seems primarily because these are the types of small monopolies that can be sought by the ethnic minorities they represent.The same activities may be seen on a grander scale at the federal level: not only the licensing of radio and television stations, airlines, drug sales (usually under prodding from interested medical lobbies), and international trade, but especially indirect protection of favored industries (through taxation and tariffs) and direct protection in the form of government purchases (in military expenditures, in \u201cforeign aid\u201d purchased from American producers, and in price supports for large agricultural businesses). The rhetoric of \u201cpublic interest\u201d involved in such regulatory activities does not mirror the actual pattern of monopolization, patronage bargaining, and market controls involved.<\/p>\n

From a more sociological viewpoint, however, there is a certain appropriateness in this terminology. It is no accident that professions, the most privileged and monopolistic of occupations, should define themselves in altruistic terms, and that at least a certain aspect of this should be convincing. For moral categories refer to the preeminence of the community over the individual, and professions are above all occupational communities. Their ideology reflects reality in the sense that individual practitioners are supposed to subordinate all self-seeking that conflicts with the general interests of other practitioners. Since we commonly miss the difference between private communities and the larger community of the whole populace, it is easy for the rhetoric of altruistic dedication to the former to slide over into an appearance of altruism toward the latter. The same conceptual trick is played by the rhetoric of justifying governmental regulation, and in a double sense. Monopolies are generally given to groups rather than to individuals; thus the very fact that it is the government\u2014which seems to represent the entire community\u2014that grants the monopoly, seems to indicate that the whole population is acting to enforce altruistic standards on one of its parts. But the governments of America do not represent the community as a whole; rather they represent the most mobilized interest communities within it, and the political representatives bargain among themselves to transfer certain governmental powers to private groups to make their private community structure even stronger. The ongoing process of reform in America, as different private groups enter the bargaining, only serves to make private property interests ever more strongly entrenched. American capitalism permeates not only the upper reaches of the corporate economy, but much of the occupational structure as well.<\/p>\n

* White Protestants tend to be disproportionately in the professions and in entrepreneurial businesses, Catholics heavily in government and bureaucracy generally. Particular craft unions have their own ethnic stamp and set their boundaries against ethnic outsiders (Greer, 1959). Blacks are disproportionately in lower-working-class positions and in specialized sectors of the white-collar world, especially government employment.<\/p>\n

* education is part of a system of cultural stratification and that the reason most students are in school is that they (or their parents on their behalf) want a decent job. This means that the reasons for going to school are extraneous to whatever goes on in the classroom. Reformers expecting that intellectual curiosity can be rearoused by curricular reforms or by changes in the school authority structure were projecting their own intellectual interests onto a mass of students for whom education is merely a means to a nonintellectual end. This even applies to radical proposals like that of Illich that schools should be taken completely out of the classroom and into factories, offices, shipyards, or wherever else students want to learn. This overlooks the fact that most skills are\u2014or can be\u2014learned on the job…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Randall Collins writes in this 1979 book: * A better explanation of professionals\u2019 altruistic codes of ethics is that they are defenses against the potential distrust of their clients (Wilensky, 1964).5 An occupation that monopolizes an important skill and reserves … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[551,29729],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-medicine"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t