Was Durkheim a professional sociologist?

At some point in the history of sociology there was a transition from the founding non-professional genius to the professional disciplinary researcher. Marx and Tocqueville certainly fall in the former category; Robert Merton, Mayer Zald, and Neil Smelser fall clearly in the latter. By some time in the mid-twentieth century sociology had become "professionalized." What is the situation of the "professional" sociologist? To what extent and why is this an improvement? And where do Durkheim and Weber fall in this transition?

We might characterize a discipline as --

a complex set of social institutions that organize, validate, and evaluate the work products of knowledge seekers. 

This means several things: organized processes for identifying and ranking important research problems; institutions for selecting and training young scientists; formal processes for evaluating scientific work; institutions for valorizing and disseminating scientific results; and ways of prioritizing certain methods of knowledge formation and discouraging others. As Andrew Abbott shows in Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred, the discipline of sociology is an amalgam of journals and editorial boards, annual conferences, associations, research universities, departments of sociology, tenure processes and standards, and funding mechanisms. And the discipline succeeds to a substantial degree in fostering certain forms of scientific behavior among young sociologists while discouraging other forms. Heterodox researchers and innovators -- counter-disciplinary thinkers -- have a harder time in building a career in the discipline at every stage: dissertation, job seeking, promotion and tenure, and publication in high-value journals. So we might say that an academic field has become professionalized when it has created the institutions and norms that serve to guide, constrain, and regulate the scientific activities of its practitioners. (Abbott offers an extensive sociology of the professions in The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. And he analyzes academic disciplines in Chaos of Disciplines. Here is an earlier post on the sociology of the professions.)

We should begin by asking this basic question: why might professionalization of sociology be thought to be a good thing? Why is the formalization of a scientific or academic discipline a good step forward? The answers, if there are any, ought to be epistemic. We'd like to think that the professionalization of science leads to an improvement in the quality of the product -- the veridicality, scope, depth, and practical value of the products of the social activity of science. And disciplines might do this in at least two ways.

First, they might serve to embody and enforce standards of scientific rigor; they might give institutional expression to valid methods of scientific research and inference. And on the people side, they might create mechanisms of evaluation of researchers and their products that consistently identify talent and sort out high quality researchers. This promotes the high achievers, motivates everyone, and winnows out the unproductive.

And second, the institutions of a discipline might serve to enhance the collective effectiveness of the research community by establishing and organizing a scientific division of labor; they might serve to focus collective attention on a limited set of problems selected to be important -- cognitively or practically. In other words, the rules and norms of the discipline might be epistemically virtuous: they might serve to ratchet up the veridicality and scope of science as a social activity.

But do the norms and institutions of the social science disciplines actually achieve these good results? Not always. In fact, we can identify directly dysfunctional features of the disciplines: a dogmatic insistence on some methods over others, a myopic focus on research problems that are ideologically selected; a tendency to discourage innovators. (See several earlier posts on the negative potential of disciplines in the social and human sciences; sociology, political science.)

So now let's return to the cases of Tocqueville and Durkheim. How do these beacons of French sociology fare on the spectrum of the academic professions? Tocqueville is the easier case. He was an innovative and rigorous thinker when it came to understanding the social world around him. But he was clearly not a "professional," for several reasons. He was not immersed in an evaluative framework in the context of which his scientific work was to be judged. His research questions were of his own design, not part of an active community of sociologists with considered judgments about what topics were important. His reasoning about society and history followed his own intuitions about inference and explanation, not a community-based set of norms dictating answers to these questions. There was no professional discipline of sociology in 1835, and Tocqueville was not a professional.

The case of Durkheim is a bit more difficult.  (Steven Lukes's Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study is a superb critical discussion of Durkheim's intellectual development (google books).  Robert Nisbet's The Sociology of Emile Durkheim is also valuable.)  Durkheim was highly credentialed, with degrees from the École Normale Supérieure -- and of course credentialing is a crucial component of professionalization. At the same time he was a founder; he was a highly original thinker with his own intuitions about what society consists of and how to research it. This implies that he was a "genius founder" or a sui generis amateur. But he was also embedded within a tradition of thought that was beginning to look more like an emerging discipline of sociology. His thought fit logically and clearly -- albeit with originality -- into a tradition of teachers and writers like Fustel de Coulanges and Hyppolite Taine -- another mark of being part of a discipline or research tradition.  And he distinguished himself from Comte and Spencer by committing himself to specialized studies of particular social phenomena -- yet another sign of professionalism (Lukes, 137-38; 289).

And what about publications and external standards of quality assessment? Here again, Durkheim was on the cusp of a transition. He himself was the creator and long-time editor of one of the first sociological journals in 1896, L'Année Sociologique.  His goal was to establish a working collaboration of young sociologists to contribute to the progress and specialization of the new science of sociology.  Other young sociologists associated with the journal included Célestin Bouglé, Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, Robert Hertz, Maurice Halbwachs, and François Simiand.  Durkheim was a prolific reviewer of other people's academic work in the journal (a discipline-like activity), and he did so on the basis of standards that were clearly sociological.  And of course he published numerous important and influential books on different aspects of social order, and these books helped to set the research agenda for French sociology for the next generation -- yet another disciplinary activity.

So perhaps we can say that Durkheim played a dual role with respect to sociology as a professional social science. He both contributed to the definition and articulation of a discipline of sociology, and he also fell within that discipline. He was a professional sociologist in the somewhat unusual sense that Bob "Barky" Barkhimer was a professional NASCAR driver: he helped to create the very institutional processes and institutions that would eventually validate his work.

The professions as an object of study

Several gifted sociologists over the past thirty years have made innovative contributions to the study of the "sociology of professions." Most recent among these is Andrew Abbott, whose book, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, is a superlative contribution to sociological theory formation. Abbott has also given attention to one profession in particular, university faculty, in two other interesting books, Chaos of Disciplines and Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred. Earlier contributions to the study of professions include books by Mayer Zald, including Occupations and organizations in American society: The organization-dominated man?, The correctional institution for juvenile offenders: An analysis of organizational "character", and his first book, YMCA in Atlanta: Environment and adaptation. (As the titles indicate, Zald's interests cross over between professions and organizations; but the two are plainly linked.)

Examples of professions that are considered by Abbott and Zald include psychiatrists, social workers, accountants, physicians, professors, and pharmacists. And I suppose we might extend the list quite a bit, to include journalists, lawyers, real estate agents, university presidents, property assessors, architects, clergy, and engineers. But what about more borderline examples: skilled auto mechanics, sculptors, acupuncturists, necromancers, landscapers, and tarot card readers? And how about corporate executives, bankers, skilled pickpockets, and pirates? We know what a professional opera singer is: it is a person who can earn her living in this career. But is an opera singer a "professional" in the relevant sense? What is a "professional", anyway? What are the relationships among profession, occupation, skill, expertise, income, work, prestige, and credential? And how is this a sociological question?

As the examples suggest, there are several dimensions of qualification that we might intuitively consider to define the concept of "professional". Is it a person who earns his/her living by exercising a skill or talent? Is it a person who has had formal training in a high-prestige type of work? Is it a person who is credentialed by a recognized credentialing agency? Is it a person who is tagged with the social label "professional" by other people in his/her society? Or is it a person who is a member of an organization of people doing the same kind of work?

We might suppose that the concept of "professional" is an overlap concept that involves the intersection of skill, knowledge, credential, association, and prestige -- with the implication that there are members of society who have several of these features but not others, and are therefore not regarded as "professionals".

Notice that these are all conceptual questions; they have to do with how we choose to define a certain category of social action and actor. Here we have quite a bit of choice -- though we want our definition of "professional" to have some relationship to ordinary usage. This brings the idea of the social construction of social categories into play; for example, does it make sense to imagine that "bare-foot doctors" constituted a profession in revolutionary China, given the strong ideology of egalitarianism that was present? Presumably bare-foot doctors were regarded as "workers", not professionals.

Once we have clarified the concept -- that is, once we have delineated the domain of social behavior and action that falls under the concept of "the professions" -- we can then do specific empirical work. The empirical work falls in many areas, and much of it depends on detailed studies of historical cases. We can examine the training and schooling that is customarily associated with the profession of pharmacy or accounting at a particular point in time; we can trace out the multiple professional organizations and associations that existed for pharmacists or accountants in the 1920s; we can examine in detail the processes involved in accreditation and credentialing for the profession at a certain time; and we can observe the rising and falling fortunes of the professions over time, as they compete for space in the ecology of an existing social system. (Abbott gives a lot of attention, for example, to the struggle between social workers and psychiatrists over the right to treat mentally ill patients.)

The topic of training regimes and professional associations is particularly accessible to empirical study; the sociologist can dig into archives and discover quite a bit of concrete detail about the ways in which accountants or physicians were trained in 1920 and the ways in which they were credentialed by the relevant professional organizations. They can consider the processes by which a segment of the skilled work force becomes "professionalized." And they can consider in detail the lobbying campaigns and public relations efforts conducted by professional organizations to retain certain skilled performances exclusively for their members. (This is the jurisdictional question that is central in many studies of the professions.)

Abbott's conceptual approach is signaled by the subtitle of his book: "the division of expert labor." He highlights abstract knowledge as the prime criterion of an area of skilled work constituting a profession: "For abstraction is the quality that sets interprofessional competition apart from competition among occupations in general. Any occupation can obtain licensure (e.g., beauticians) or develop ethics code (e.g., real estate). But only a knowledge system governed by abstractions can redefine its problems and tasks, defend them from interlopers, and seize new problems--as medicine has recently seized alcoholism, mental illness, hyperactivity in children, obesity, and numerous other things. Abstraction enables survival in the competitive system of professions" (8-9). Expertise is an expression of abstract knowledge; and the possession of knowledge-based expertise is the result of formal training and the foundation of licensure.

For Abbott, then, the sociology of the professions needs to focus on the systems through which the relevant forms of abstract knowledge are created; the educational systems through which pre-professionals acquire this knowledge; and the professional associations that oversee both education and current practice through their power of licensure. These associations turn out to be potent social actors: through their leadership at a given point in time, they take actions designed to improve the profession and improve the social and economic environment for the profession in the future. (This is the competitive part of the story mentioned above.)

The other central sociological question that comes up in Abbott's treatment is the organizational one: how are the organizations of society arranged in such a way as to incorporate the specialized knowledge of the professions? This takes us into consideration of hospitals, law firms, banks, and universities, and the intricate pathways of development through which each of these organizational forms have developed in the past century. (This is also a point of contact with Zald's careful work on organizations such as the YMCA and social-service organizations.)

I've dwelled on this precinct of sociology because it is one of the areas of sociological research that involves a fascinating mix of objective, case-based research and somewhat ephemeral social entities -- the profession of accountancy, the profession of medicine. These are social "things" in some sense -- but they are highly abstract entities involving a constant change of personnel, standards, curricula, bodies of knowledge and expertise, and zones of jurisdiction. As such, the study of professions seems to well illustrate a point that seems fundamental to me: that we need to understand the social world as a plastic, heterogeneous, and shifting range of activities, rather than as an ensemble of fixed social structures or entities. The beauty of Abbott's work is his ability to give some definition to a reality that he fully recognizes to be in flux.