ABSTRACT
The modern model of profession undoubtedly incorporates pre-industrial criteria of status and pre-industrial ideological orientations. The professions that were formed in America were clearly inspired by their European models— especially the British, in the beginning— but, obviously, there were structural differences between the New World and the old which account for many differences in the professional process and in the emergent pattern. The modern professions were spawned, thus, by incomplete but nonetheless awesome developments. The possibility of organizational creation had arisen for them, as well as for the industrial bourgeoisie that was "shaping the world in its image." The collective project of professionalization, furthermore, has its roots in a time of radical and rapid change: the men involved in this project were the "carriers of social structure" and they carried the imprint of changing historical circumstances. The general circumstances which imprinted the first phase of professionalization were roughly the same for all the professions.
