ABSTRACT
From the nineteenth and into the twenty-fi rst century professionals have been granted unprecedented powers to affect, control and regulate the lives of large numbers of people in developed societies. Professionals base their claims to authority on the practical claim that modern society needs ‘experts’ to solve its problems. They also make the political claim that they will use their expert knowledge in a disinterested manner that will serve the common good. Every area of social life considered to be problematic is now subject to professional scrutiny – especially poverty, crime, disease and education. These areas are now unimaginable without the presence of professionals to explain, alleviate, solve or control. Functionalist sociologist Talcott Parsons regarded professionals, with their special status and prestige as essential to maintaining a social structure with an occupational division of labour. Medicine, law, technology and teaching were his choice of institutional structures which demanded professional skills that lay people did not have (Parsons 1954). Parsons also claimed that professionals work with a scientifi c rigour that the uninitiated did not possess. Max Weber, however, saw professionals as occupational groups controlling access to scarce, highly marketable skills and situated in the middle and upper levels in stratifi ed societies – a major characteristic of professionals being relative superiority over and distance from the working classes (Weber 1954).
