BRITISH PROFESSIONS TODAY: THE STATE OF ... - Property Week

Introduction continued >>
Knowledge has become more specialized and technology
more complex, resulting in greater power for established
professions as well as the growth of new professions.
Journalism, management consultancy, and public
administration are just a few of the many occupations
which have attained professional status in the twentieth
century (Ibid.).
The origins of many modern professional bodies are to be
found in social clubs, formed to provide a forum to exchange
ideas on a particular subject without any conscious intention
of becoming a regulatory institution. For example, RICS
counts as its antecedents the Surveyors Club (1792), the Land
Surveyors Club (1834), and the Surveyors’ Association (1864).
By 1868 surveyors in these and other clubs saw enough
identity of purpose to create the Institution of Surveyors, and
a Royal Charter was granted in 1881. The Law Society was
founded in 1825, after several prominent lawyers met to call
for the formation of a law institution to raise the reputation of
the profession by setting standards and ensuring good practice
(Sugarman 1994).
As professions became more established, with distinct sets
of interests, memberships, and bodies of knowledge, so they
began to seek monopoly and privilege. To attain this, they had
to enter into a special relationship with the state so as to
achieve a monopoly, or at least licensure (MacDonald 1995).
This agreement has come to be called the ‘regulative bargain’
with the state (Cooper et al. 1988). The political culture of a
society, which influences the style of this regulative bargain,
can be seen as crucial for the development of a profession.
As a “mixed economy” Britain falls somewhere in between
the extremes of the most capitalist or free-market oriented
states, eg the United States, and the state-controlled,
command economy of the former USSR (Perkin 1996).
In continental Europe, professions generally have been and
are mainly employed in the public sector, closely connected to
and controlled by state authorities (Torstendahl and Burrage
1990). The Anglo-American ‘ideal type,’ by contrast, stresses
the freedom of self-employed practitioners to control working
conditions (Collins 1990). These differences are also reflected
in the types of professionalisation; the Anglo-American type
focuses on “private government” within an occupation, whilst
the Continental type focuses on the political struggle for
control within an elite bureaucratic hierarchy (Ibid.).
So, the evolution of professional structures has not been a
static or isolated series of events. Professions have been,
and continue to function as, part of an important dialectical
movement within British society. Professionals play key roles
in reflecting and developing societal views, norms and
procedures. One of the most obvious manifestations of this
process is the standardised procedure of ‘precedent’ in English
common law. Common law can be contrasted with the more
rigorous, code-based civil law systems of continental Europe,
in which judicial precedents are considered persuasive as
opposed to binding. Professions have matured and evolved
whilst influencing the concurrent development of the British
system of government and constitution.
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