ABSTRACT
Employed engineers sometimes claim that their status as employees denies them the autonomy necessary to be “true professionals.” Such claims also appear in important scholarly work. For example, in The Revolt of the Engineers, Edwin Layton observed: “Employers have been unwilling to grant autonomy to their employees, even in principle. They have assumed that the engineer, like any other employee, should take orders. . . . [But] the very essence of professionalism lies in not taking orders from an employer.” 1 What are we to make of the claim that professionalism is inconsistent with being an employee (or, at least, with taking orders from an employer)? Is it a conceptual truth (a deduction from definitions) or an empirical one? How might it be proved—or disproved?
