ABSTRACT
This was an odd and unpredictable turnaround. The sociology of the professions which had for decades been a backwater of sociological thought found itself central to a burgeoning literature on the significance of the need to protect the public sphere against the incursions of an increasingly privatised and market-driven society. Perkin’s (1989) history of the rise of ‘professional society’ provided the groundwork for this new sociology of the professions, which has helped frame recent and current thinking on professional practice in terms of a radical reorientation towards the relation between professionals and their publics. From being a dirty word, ‘professionalism’ became one of the good words: part of the indispensable lexicon of those who would seek to consider, against the odds, the possibility of ‘the good society’ – or at least, as Margalit (1996) would have it, ‘the decent society’.
