ABSTRACT
Just as in the “natural” course of events every person knows least about himself, his “real nature,” his effect on others, his “function” in the world in which he lives (indeed, what world it is that he lives in) so too, and for analogous reasons, for all social groups, and not least for professions. The view a profession has of itself-or, to be more exact, the shared views the professionals hold, in virtue of which they recognize each other as col leagues-has the same relation to reality, and a similar set of functions, as has a person's unreconstructed self-image. It is to function as a guide to salability, or at least negotiability, internal and external, which is to say that it is to be primarily a polite, politic, and political version of and front for the underlying realities. I t is a presentation-a guise in which-a dis guise for what is to be presented, partly by selection out of what is pres ent, partly out of what can be made to appear so.
