ABSTRACT
Two major tendencies are clearly present in the recent sociology of class and the professions; tendencies which seem to involve mutually incompatible analyses of the class location and the political potential, within the capitalist division of labour, of the groups who identify themselves or have been identified as professionals. On the one hand are those who, like Gouldner (1979), argue that the professionals occupy a unique position in the division of labour and are, or may become, characterized by an outlook and set of motivations which are distinctively new, and which offer a potential liberation to society from the selfish material interests of previously dominant groups. On the other hand are those, who like Johnson (1976, 1977a, b), are concerned with mapping the positions of the professionals within a Marxist analysis of the class structure, and seeking to establish the economic location and political potential of the professional groups in terms of a class struggle which remains fundamentally dichotomous. Writers in the first tradition have concentrated on the issue of knowledge and the conditions for its production and application; while for the second group of authors the tendency to treat knowledge as an independent variable is seen as part of a process creating and sustaining not only the myth of the professions but also the entire capitalist order. And they have argued that it is crucial to locate the ‘professionals’ in terms of their relationship to the developing capitalist labour process and the associated political and ideological contexts which serve to ensure the continuing reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. In this paper I hope to investigate some of the problems with both forms of analysis and argue that the position of professions can only be located on the basis of a reconsideration of a number of fundamental questions: first, any attempt to locate the professions in the class structure has to make certain assumptions about the nature of capital; second, it has to make some assumption about the tendencies of development within the division of labour; third, it has to make assumptions about the relationship between class position and class action; fourth, it has to embody a theory of the State and the interrelationship between the development of the capitalist mode of production and the development of the State; and fifth to address the problem of bureaucratization and its consequences. There are clearly limits to the independence of the assumptions which can be made on each of these dimensions, and particular attempts to locate the professions tend to use basic assumptions integrated by a pre-existing theoretical paradigm. The first part of the argument involves an appraisal of the contributions of the leading theorists to debate on the position of the new middle class in current society, especially with respect to their treatments of the above issues.
