I'm partway through Donald Schön's The Reflective Practitioner—a study of how professionals (doctors, lawyers, architects, social workers) "think in action" as they conduct their work.
While certainly dated (it was written in the early 1980s), the book still has plenty of observational nuggets to offer, including a thoughtful discussion of what, exactly, a "profession" is.
Schön offers the definition of Wilbert Moore as a starting point:
[A profession] involves the application of general principles to specific problems.
A profession stands in opposition to what other thinkers, including Alfred North Whitehead, would call an "avocation." Whitehead describes and "avocation" as "based "based upon customary activities and modified by trial and error of individual practice."
In other words, an avocation does not have a "systematic knowledge base" associated with it. Many professions go to specialized schools or places of learning to acquire this knowledge base—which may include a general body of theory, applied theory, and even training in practical skills or relevant professional activities. Doctors go to medical school, architects go to architecture school, lawyers go to law school.
In the thinking of the 1980s, anyway, careers without professional schools were not "professions." Some even argued that for a distinction between "major" and "minor" professions, based on the type and structure of this knowledge base. I don't know that I agree with this summary, but here is Nathan Glazer's distinction, as described by Schön:
The major professions are "disciplined by an unambiguous end—health, success in litigation, fundamental knowledge, of which scientific knowledge is the prototype, or else they have "a high component of strictly technological knowledge based on science in the education which type provide." In contrast, the minor professions suffer from shifting, ambiguous ends and from unstable institutional contexts of practice, and are therefore unable to develop a base of systematic, scientific professional knowledge.
Some professions, Glazer argues, such as social work, education, and divinity, do not have a coherent knowledge base that all professionals in the given field draw on.
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