ABSTRACT
The generalized tendency toward professionalization is commonly seen as one of the characteristic features of the occupational structure in advanced industrial societies. The predominant role of applied science and technology generates new professions or, rather, new specialties, as well as new demands for the application of "old" knowledge and skills. The intimate relation of both new specialties and old professions with central organizations does not bring them, however, into the category of "organizational professions." Organizational professions proper are generated by heteronomous bureaucracies, and primarily by the expansion of the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. Insofar as such policies involved the professional staff of the bureaucracy, this would be an example of totally manipulative client-orientation. Two sets of assumptions underlied this perceived conflict: the one concerned an idealized notion of "free" profession, the other derived from having taken the Weberian model of bureaucracy as a totality.
