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The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. By Andrew Abbott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. 452 pp. Notes, references, index. Paper, $25.00. ISBN: 0-226-00069-9.
Rarely but not unheard of, some books are so brilliant, so thorough, and so persuasive that they virtually shut down a vibrant academic subfield. Perry Miller's The New England Mind is such a book. So breathtaking in its sweep and so grand in its scholarly reach, subsequent scholars could only pick away at the edges of the subject for the next half-century after its publication. I would argue that Andrew Abbott's The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor is another such book. So theoretically dense, so well grounded in the existing literature, and so broad in its reach is Abbott's book that anyone seeking to study the professions after reading it had difficulty imagining they could say anything new that his book had not already covered. That Abbott's work could have had such a chilling effect on the sociological study of the professions is particularly remarkable, given the long and rich sociological literature on the professions that stretches back to the 1930s.
A. M. Carr-Saunders and P. A. Wilson's The Professions (1933) exemplifies the traditional analysis of the professions. The Professions was a pioneering study that laid out both a short history of each of the professions and the set of characteristics that served to unify the various fields. Subsequent sociologists would refine this model, the most important being Magali Sarfatti Larson and Eliot Friedson, who persuasively argued in the 19705 that professionals sought to protect themselves from markets and that the professions were not simply a positive force to raise ethical standards but also a selfish group driven by their self-interests to create guilds in order to control their working conditions, pay, and status. Yet it was Andrew Abbott who truly revolutionized the study of the professions by arguing that the professions did not operate independently,...