A Professionalized Society: Our Real Future

When I asked my wife, she suggested that most people do not want to become professionals in the sociological sense. She was not even sure that a majority of persons are capable of it.
When I brought the subject up with Dan Papp, President of Kennesaw State University, he replied that he thought a great many people did aspire to become professionals. That’s why they came to college.
When my literary agent referred my manuscript “A Professionalized Society: Our Real Future” to a publisher, she wrote back that she didn’t believe there was a market for the work. According to her, it was “too intelligent.”
As for myself, I remain convinced that we are headed toward a more professionalized society. We may be getting there slowly— at an almost glacial pace—but I think we are inexorably moving in this direction.
Professionals are “self-motivated experts”. Almost everyone agrees that doctors fit this definition. They spend many years learning how the human body works and studying what is needed to fix it when it stops functioning. But more than this; when they apply their knowledge, they are expected to do so of their own accord.
When a physician arrives at a diagnosis, he or she is supposed to get it right because he or she is personally committed to helping patients. Doing so to please a supervisor would be considered a dereliction of duty. So would prescribing a particular treatment merely because this is demanded by an insurance company.
Doctors are supposed to pursue competence because they care—and by and large they do. To engage in shoddy work, or to make a particular choice solely because they were ordered to, would violate their sense of professional integrity. It would reduce them to the level of a manual laborer, which would cancel out the many years of effort expended to achieve their exalted status.
Nowadays, this attitude also extends to nurses. Where once they were the dutiful handmaidens of physicians, they have risen to become semi-independent practitioners. Although still less prestigious than doctors, they are often delegated tasks that require both substantial competence and personal responsibility.
To illustrate, last year I suffered a lung infection that required the insertion of a PICC line (that is, a peripherally inserted central catheter). This thin plastic tube was introduced into a vein in my upper right arm and then threaded down into the center of my chest. The procedure, though delicate, was entirely entrusted to two nurses.
Fortunately, the nurses who attended me were experts in what they did. At no time did they require a physician to directly supervise their activities. Moreover, they were professionally dedicated to getting the procedure done correctly—which they did.
This greater professionalization of nurses is reflected in the training they receive at colleges such as Kennesaw State University. Before being accepted to one of these programs, they must demonstrate academic abilities and a personal maturity much in excess of the average student.
So challenging is KSU’s nursing program that, as with physicians, our graduates take pride in their accomplishments. They feel like professionals because they have indeed become self-motivated experts; experts who are perfectly capable of independent courses of action.
I contend that this is becoming more the norm for business managers, accountants, police officers, architects, air conditioner technicians, engineers, educators, computer programmers, and social workers. All have become more professionalized and therefore more capable of supervising their own work.
If this is true, then we as a society are becoming more capable of true democracy. We can literally be more self-governing in our daily activities because we are better able to make high-quality choices—for ourselves and others.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University