ABSTRACT
Professional Dominance' was Freidson's sketch of a general statement about those defining organizations and their staff. It opens by noting the tendency of medical sociologists to be preoccupied with the individual experience of sickness, and its social distribution, and to neglect the institutional structure of health care. This remains an important criticism of medical sociology. Physicians would not become better practitioners or more humane beings through educational reform, but only by changes in the contexts of their employment. As Freidson put it, the role of the professional is a dependent variable, contingent on the institutional environment within which it is exercised. Freidson concludes both Professional Dominance and Profession of Medicine with proposals for reforms of the US health care system that would keep it true to the professed, humane, values of the physicians through significant reductions in their professional autonomy and structural dominance.
