ABSTRACT
Underlying the emergence of the corporate society, we saw in the last chapter, lay the rise of a professional society. A professional society is one structured around career hierarchies rather than classes, one in which people find their place according to trained expertise and the service they provide rather than the possession or lack of inherited wealth or acquired capital. This definition is an ideal type to which the real world can only approximate. In practice, every society contains elements of both horizontal class and vertical interest. Whether the weft of class or the warp of interest predominates in the social fabric (in the now familiar metaphor) will depend on the nature of the cloth and, in the shot silk of transition where both are striving for prominence, on the play of the light and the angle of vision. In late twentieth-century English society with its heavy hangover of class feeling and rhetoric it is exceptionally difficult to discern the emerging threads of professional interest through the remnants of declining class.
