ABSTRACT
The literature on professions and the process of professionalization has sometimes distorted our perceptions of the power of professions and their relations to the clients they serve. Older models of professions such as the model proposed by Carr-Saunders and Wilson in the 1930s, and those proposed by Millerson and Wilensky respectively in the 1960s, focused on such attributes as possession of an esoteric body of knowledge, extensive training, self-regulation and service commitment.1 Friedson challenged prevailing ideas by suggesting that autonomy, rather than organization or training, distinguished a true profession in an evolving world.2 Sociologist Andrew Abbott has, more recently, taken a systems approach to how professions are constituted and how they behave in social contexts.3 Abbott’s theory of the system of professions is helpful in explaining various forces that shape occupations in the current health care system. The extent to which Abbott’s model also affords a framework against which to examine the early twentieth-century attempt of nurse reformers to professionalize the occupation is the subject of this chapter.
