Description
This article offers a critical reflection on the theses of Pe&n (Ibe Rise of Bofessional Society: England
Since 1880, London: Routledge, 1989) and Abbott (l’be System of Apfessions, Chicago: University of
Chicago FVcss, 19&Q, and compares these with empirIcaI observations conducted by the author
(Lkzalay, 1991, Modem hw RevceW; 1992, Marcbands de droit, la restwcturution de l’o&rs jutjdique
intsrnutfonulpar les multinationalesd u dtwft,P aris: Payard) on the internationaml arketf or business
k+w.
Acwunthg, OrgPnl zati otu and Soci ety, Vol . 20, NO. 5, PP. 331-344, 1995
El sevi er Sdence Ltd. Printed in Great Britain
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“TURF BATIkE! OR “CLASS STRUGGLES”: THE INTERNATIONALI2XTION OF
THE MARKET FOR FXPERTISE IN THE “PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY”
YVES DEZALAY
Cenfre de Soci ol ogi c rl e L’Educati on el de ka Cul ture, Mai son des Sci ences de l ’tl omme, Pari s
This article offers a critical reflection on the theses of Pe&n (Ibe Ri se of Bofessi onal Soci ety: Engl and
Si nce 1880, London: Routledge, 1989) and Abbott (l’be System of Apfessi ons, Chi cago: University of
Chicago FVcss, 19&Q, and compares these with empirIcaI observations conducted by the author
(Lkzalay, 1991, Modem hw RevceW; 1992, Marcbands de droi t, l a restwcturuti on de l ’o&rs jutjdi que
i ntsrnutfonul par l es mul ti nati onal es du dtwft, Pari s: Payard) on the i nternati onal market for business
k+w. As a way of illuminating the world of the professionals, the article begins by emphasi&g how
macro&wry and micro-sociology complement and compete with each other; in the lirst, the profes-
sionaI society appears as the motor and product of the WeIfarc State; in the second, it is the permanent
confrontations between sum&s which contributes to a continuaI redcfintkm of these &Ids of practices.
These two dimensions are inherent in, if not exacerbated by, the opening of frontiers. However, both
approaches negkct the effects of class: the recruitment practices and sodal authority of these merent
groups of professionab. These fiekls symbolic power are also one of the prlndpaI sites of reproduction
- and of hierarchization - of the different forms of sodaI capital. It is perhaps there that one should
seek the expIanation for the paradox noted by Perkin: that the shattering of a professionaI society
coincides with its triumph, or at least its gewtalization.
To attempt to think about social objects such as
the State or the professions which present
themselves as natural, is to risk analyzing them
according to conceptual categories constructed
by and for these institutions. As a way of escap
ing this effect of redundance, an effect that is
bound up with the correspondence between
objective structures and cognitive structures,
Bourdieu suggests that “there is doubtless no
more powerful instrument of breach [nrpture]
than genetic reconstruction”, which makes pos
sible the identification of “excluded possibili-
ties” (1993, p. 51). In the absence of this
delicate exercise of going back to original con-
frontations, perhaps crises provide a substitute.
This is because, very often, they reactivate
them. At the very least, breaks or discrepancies
between practices and representations brought
about by crises are conducive to greater clarity
(Nelson et al ., 1992), which itself may be
enhanced by an historical approach.
Thus, challenges to the Welfare State by those
adhering to the neo-liberal ideology almost
everywhere encourage researchers to ponder
the origins of this form of institutionalization
of social compromise (Bayer, 1986; Weir et
al ., 1988). Harold Perkin (1989) finds these ori-
gins in the expansion of a professional society
which progressively substitutes its scientific
rationality [rati on&k5 suuantel and merito-
cratic logic for class antagonisms. But this tri-
umph of knowledge is a pyrrhic victory.
According to Perkin (19891, the professional
society is condemned to political impotence
by its internal quarrels. Henceforth, to the sec-
tarian jealousies of different kinds of know-how
there is added a widening gulf between profes-
sionals of the public sector and those of the
private sector. In this civil war between
experts, exacerbated by the recession and inter-
national competition, extremists on each side
paradoxically rediscover the strains of the class
331
332 Y. DEWLAY
struggle from which they borrow much of their
rhetoric. They risk forgetting that their success
was based upon their complementarity:
hitherto, an improvement of social protection
was corollary of the advance of productive
rationality.
TOWARDS A “DUAL PROFESSIONAL
SOCIETY”?
Should we see in these alarmist theses
merely a rhetorical argument which seeks to
arouse Perkin’s compatriots, before it is too
late, to check the rout of the ideal of a more
egalitarian, caring and compassionate society
(p. 518) supported, according to him, by pro-
fessionals of the public sector? To what extent
is this very pessimistic diagnosis tied to the
specificity of the British model’ of a “capital-
ism divided” (higham, 1984), striving to man-
age, so to speak, the social effects of an
industrial decline as inevitable as it is accele-
rated by the international ambitions of the
City? But in that case, does this meticulous
description not also offer a sort of prefigura-
tion of what is taking place, to a greater or
lesser extent, in all post-industrial societies,
especially those in which the elites endeavour
to reconvert their domination of national struc-
tures of industrlal production into a mastery of
this nascent international market of legal-flnan-
cial expertise? Such developments may entail a
speeding up of the process of a delocalization
of industrial activity, the social cost of which
already makes itself heavily felt ln terms of
unemployment and the exclusion of a growing
fraction of the population of Western societies.
To this extent, the split in professional society
brought to light by Perkin would be only the
mufEed echo of a more serious division, that of
a dual society where, especially in the great
metropolitan financial centres, poverty and
misery surround the enclaves of power and
wealth created by the new generations of
young urban professionals (Sassen, 1991).
This is not the only lesson that can be drawn
from the analysis of British professional society
advanced by Perkin. Anyone interested in pro
fessional phenomena can find material for
reflection here. In particular, he emphasizes
the existence of oppositions of interests that
until now professional ideology has striven to
conceal, but that the aggravation of inter-
national competition is in the process of bring-
ing into the full light of day. Perhaps because,
despite its title, this work is not inscribed in the
sphere of scientitic discourse [dfscours savant]
on the professions, it escapes quarrels over
definitions,’ as it escapes also the usual taboos
of this kind of literature, especially the one
which postulates the homogeneity, if not the
uniformity, of these different professional
milieux. This division between partisans of
market freedom and defenders of a “non-
market” public sector, to which he draws our
attention, hardly matches the professional
classifications we are used to, such as law, med-
icine or education. Everything suggests that
these attitudes concerning the market and com-
petition induce a kind of split which brings the
relative political homogeneity of these pro-
fessional milieux into question.3 It is, then, pre-
cisely this discordance between status and
’ In fact, this hypothesis of a division of the “professional society” between public and private sectors scarcely applies to
countries like France where professional elites circulate cheerfully from one to the other (Marceau, 1989) or to the United
States where, according to Gordon (1984) they “sutTer” a kind of “institutional schizophrenia” (cf. Auetbach, 1986).
* See, for example, the questions raised by the application to Germany of this concept of profession, as conceived by
North American sociology (Cocks % Jarausch, 1990, p. 10; McClelland, 1991).
3 Nonetheless, ifwe take the example of law, this split is not produced along the lines of the public-private opposition, but
between big firms working for the international market and small practices concerned almost exclusively with the
everyday problems of a clientele of individti property tmnmctions, divorce, traflic accidents. . What is in the process
of taking shape suggests, rather, a divergence of mtetests between defenders of national traditions and partisans of entry
on to the big international market.
EXPERTISE IN “PROFESSIONAL SOCIEIY 333
strategic options which gives this interrogation
its heuristic merit, while making its use diffi-
cult. Perkin himself has great difficulty in
making clear the line of demarcation
between these two groups whose antagonism
does not, as he sometimes implies, come down
to an opposition between the public and the
private. Perhaps this difficulty is due to the fact
that this political division itself could well be
just one of the premonitory signs of a recom-
position of different professional fields; a
recomposition accelerated by an economic
restructuring inaugurated by the oil crises
and, throughout the 1980s many of whose
protagonists were recruited from within these
fields of expertise (Moran, 1991; Dezalay,
1993b; Lederman, 1992).
“TURF BATTLES” OR “GANG WARS”
Thus it may not be a mere coincidence that,
at the end of this decade, an American sociol-
ogist published a book on the “system of the
professions” (Abbott, 1988) which, in many
respects, echoes this finding of a profoundly
fragmented and divided British professional
society. In both cases the professional world
is presented as a battlefield. But, where the
historian sees essentially an ideological and fra-
tricidal confrontation between two camps as
the occasion for civil or religious wars, the
sociologist takes his inspiration from the
quasi-permanent skirmishes engaged in by
urban gangs in order to redefine their respec-
tive territories. The confrontation is less fratri-
tidal than interprofessional; rather than being
self-destructive, it is, on the contrary, funda-
mental to a self-regulation of this “ecosystem
of the professions”.
By proposing this highIy Darwinist interpre-
tation of a struggle for survival, in which the
victorious professional “species” is the one
best adapted, or most adaptable to transforma-
tion of their environment, Abbott sidesteps
functionalist theses which restrict themselves
to reproducing in scientific terms [en termes
suvunts] - and thus to objectivizing - the
universalist ideology which makes the profes
sional model the best possible answer to needs
as fundamental as they are immanent. Law and
medicine provide the archetype of this idea-
lized representation of a policed universe in
which the cult of knowledge [suvoir] and con-
viviality combine harmoniously with the voca-
tion of public service so as to keep at arm’s
length material and vulgar preoccupations
unworthy of these gentlemen’s professions.
On the contrary, in the schema advanced by
Abbott, competition rules, and it is all the
more ferocious for being without, or almost
without, rules. The territorial wrangles he
describes evoke the laws of the jungle more
than those of honour. The organizational
principle of this milieu is not “noblesse
oblige” but the law of the strongest or the will
to survive. In fact, this model is inspired overtly
by the observation of street gangs which estab-
lished the reputation of the Chicago school of
sociology.
It might seem incongruous, if not out of
place, to bring together these two worlds
which are poles apart in social space. Actu-
ally, it is. At least, it is in the strict sense of
the term; for it is this transposition of an
approach and of conceptual categories elabo-
rated to account for another social milieu
which gives this analysis its heuristic force. It
surprises, it shocks, for it reverses alI the con-
ventions of common sense which tend to pre-
sent the professional universe as the triumph of
rationality and civility. But in so doing it reveals
the unspoken of this common sense. Its icono-
clastic aspect is precisely what enables it to
breach the defences that these fields of power
erect against an objective knowledge by impos-
ing on those who claim to analyse them read-
ing grids which are the basis of their symbolic
power in the social space. Since these experts
produce rationality and civility, there is a ten-
dency to see them - and for them to present
themselves - as if they were the most exemp
lary manifestation of these qualities. Thus,
before the big bung turned them into conglom-
erates of professional mercenaries in the ser-
vice of big financial interests, law firms were
334 Y. DEULAY
quite ready to boast of being “the most perfect
example as well as the iinal refuge of Athenian
democracy”. It has been possible to sustain this
myth, very useful for their legitimacy, to the
extent that the temples of knowledge and
power have remained sufficiently opaque to
the profane. The exacerbation of international
and interprofessional competition has led these
enterprises to enter into a politics of commu-
nication (by attracting public relations specia-
lists and by sustaining a burgeoning trade
press) in order to promote other images, like
that of the expert who does not hesitate to
display “creative imagination” in order to
defend his client’s interests “aggressively”
(Eisler, 1990).
This example suggests that the success of
this demystifying analysis is no doubt also due
to its timeliness. “Casino capitalism” (Strange,
1986) and aggravation of international eco-
nomic war renders somewhat outmoded the
idealized representation which made the pro
fessions the guardians of spiritual power who,
having by their function an excess of virtue, are
like worthy successor’s of medieval clerks.
Actually, the smug picture of the activities of
the modern yuppies of finance and law offered
to us by the practitioners themselves (Lewis,
1989; Lederman, 1992) together with journal-
istic investigations devoted to unravelling the
structures of junk bond markets (Stewart,
1991) or the mechanisms for laundering dirty
money (Eing & Frantz, 1992; Truell & Gurwin,
1992), give an image of professional practices
closer to gang warfare than to the practices of
monastic cloisters.
The new skirmishes in the war of law and
figures (Dezalay, 1991, 1993~) - one of
whose protagonists, the senior partner of one
of the big six, publicly invites legal clerks to
“leave their cloisters in order to become busi-
nessmen”* - are situated at the same level.
And this does not concern only the profes-
sionals close to business milieux. As is shown
by research on AIDS, the world of medical
research is hardly spared by this virus of
cross-border competition which jusititles
every appetite as well as every excess. Even
so, are we dealing with a recent phenom-
enon, brought to light, but also aggravated
by, international competition? Is the crisis of
the professions a corollary of the economic
crisis? Is the revival of tribal wars in the world
of expertise an effect of the dismemberment of
the State? This last hypothesis, which remains
quite attractive,’ leads to a combination of Per-
kin’s and Abbott’s contributions. This conver-
gence also emphasizes what seems to us to be
one of the principal gaps in the latter’s analysis:
whereas, for the historian, the professional
society is at the centre of transformations of
the field of power, this political dimension is
almost entirely absent from the system of the
professions.
However, Abbott himself leans on history,
but as a sociologist rather than historian. He
makes ample use of history in order to show
that interprofessional poaching is endemic and
proliferates at the slightest opportunity. Cer-
tainly, these openings or “discoveries”, which
enable pioneers of the professions to colonize
new territories of influence, may be more or
less numerous according to the epoch or sec-
tors of activity. But no doubt because he wants
to avoid at any price falling into the trap of
evolutionism, which for a long time has been
one of the major characteristics of scientific
discourse [dticours suuunt] on the profes
sions, whether functionalist or critical, he is
very careful to avoid suggesting anything that
might resemble an explanation in terms of
macro-bistorical processes.
In a way one could say that for Abbott there
is no history in the sense of the long-term
[longue dutiel; there are only constantly
changing circumstances without it being pos-
sible to identify directing principles either in
political history or in the history of modes of
4 Cf. Wachman, R., Wffl hvycrs sacrifice their professional vows?, Accountanqv Age (1989).
5 And that we have tried to apply to the intanati~tion of the market for business law @e~alay, 1993a).
EXPERTISE IN “PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY” 335
production. If he draws frequently upon
examples from the history of the professions,
this is only the better to show that this history
is constantly being replayed. New professions
are born while others die or are transformed.
But all of this takes place in a relatively decen-
tralized, if not chaotic way, without the effect
of major social transformations like the expan-
sion of the university,6 or the development of
State intervention - and so, u fortrorf, chal-
lenges arising from internationalization -
being clearly discernible. His model is de-his-
toricized because it is de-politicized: the pro
fessional system he depicts seems to be almost
disconnected from social and political history.
The relations that this “system” maintains
with other neighbouring social fields, like the
State or politics or the production of knowl-
edge, are nowhere presented in a systematic
way. However, relations between different pro-
fessions are far from being restricted to territor-
ial confrontations. An implicit hierarchy exists
which takes account of the positions of differ-
ent professions in the field of power and
knowledge. These statutory differences do no
more than translate the importance of the
social or scientific capital [cu@tdZ stunt] they
have accumulated. Prestige and age usually go
together. This stratification is manifested -
and constantly reinforced - on the occasion
of the recruitment of new entrants. The most
“noble” professions attract the best endowed
“heirs” as well as the most brilliant - or most
ambitious d “arrW.stes”. The choice of these
applicants is easily explained. They know that
by aspiring to a particularly prestigious profes-
sional title they will benefit automatically from
the collective capital of renown that it repre-
sents. In return, all of their colleagues will
profit from the eagerness of these newcomers
to advance their career by expanding the field
of influence of the know-how they have chosen.
According to the logic of the corps, individual
success is conditioned by the group’s social
renown, and vice versa.
To be sure, this system of hierarchical posi-
tions is far from being inviolable. Just as in the
social field, concurrent principles of hierarchi-
zation, which are complementary as well as
antagonistic, exist in the professional world.
It is the old struggle for temporal and spiritual
power continuing today between the financial
bourgeoisie and the intellectual bourgeoisie.
The many links between Oxbridge and the
City in no way exclude jealousies or antagon-
isms between the hierarchies of money and
knowledge. Parallel to the territorial struggles
for occupation of new markets, struggles take
place continuously for power and prestige
which have their own logic and contribute at
least as much to the transformation of the pro
fessional landscape. However, these symbolic
struggles cannot be analyzed without taking
into account the social history of the political
field in which the principles of classification
and hierarchization, around which the diier-
ent fractions of the establishment confront
each other, are constantly redefined. In short,
it seems to us that Abbott, by refusing to situate
himself within the framework of a political his-
tory, is condemned to leave uncompleted his
project of “thinking rationally” about the sys-
tem of the professions.
One can certainly see here a deliberate
choice, no doubt inspired as much by the tradi-
tional terrain of the Chicago school of soci-
ology as by a (justified) distrust of a sociology
of the professions which has greatly abused
pseudo-historical explanations. To get out of
this impasse, like Perkin we must bring the
political dimension back into the professional
field. Moreover, the present context of the
internationalization of the market for expertise
especially lends itself to this. To understand the
game of competition between the different
national professional fields it is necessary to
take into account what each of them owes to
the position it occupies in a space of power,
which is no more than the product of the social
history of these diierent nations. As is shown
o He notes, however, but in conclusion, that the expansion of access to higher education produces a banaRmion of
eq=- @. 317%
336 Y. DEWLAY
by current commercial negotiations, whether
global or regional, the delocalization of the
market for services transforms “turf battles”
Into international confrontations in which pro-
fessional groups do not hesitate to mobilize all
the political capital they have at their disposal.
Thus, in this new context, to follow Abbott’s
approach, we should accord much more
importance than he does to the diversity of
national forms of the structuration of this field
of power.
This requires that we re-centre analysis on
the role of these professions in strategies for
the reproduction of elites. This is because the
professional field plays a central role in the
mechanism of reproduction of social hier-
archies that is also strongly affected by an open-
ing of borders, the corollary of which is a
reconversion of national elites into a transna-
tional elite. The importance of the stakes and
the difficulties of the undertaking explain those
behaviours, as opportunist as they are mercan-
tilist, that have been noted by a good many
observers. If competition becomes increas-
ingly exacerbated and confrontations multiply
in these universes of gentlemen who valorize
collegiality or “art for art’s sake”, it is because
it is not only a matter of territorial struggles
but, above all perhaps, of struggles for power.
What is at stake is a redefinition, on an inter-
national scale, of a whole series of pecki ng
orders established - and more or less stabi-
lized - on a national basis. It is therefore not
only the small minority of applicants for entry
into this future transnational elite who feel con-
cerned by such a stake, but also all of their
fellows or colleagues whose symbolic capital
risks Iinding itself brutally devalued or reva-
lued on the new International market of profes-
sional qualifications in the process of being
constituted. These are the themes that we
would like to sketch out by using the analysis
of strategies of social reproduction presented
in La Nobl esse d’Etat (Bourdieu, 1989) as
well as our own research in Marcbands de
droi t (Dezalay, 1992) and on the intemationa-
lization of the legal field.’ But before trying to
reintroduce this reflection in terms of social
determinisms and strategies of reproduction of
bourgeois elites, almost totally absent from the
scientific [savant] discourse on the professions,
we must consider the reason for this blindness.
“ORGANIZED PREJUDICE”
More than any other discipline, the sociology
of the professions merits Perkin’s harsh judge-
ment likening social science to “organized pre-
judice” @. 397). However, in this case, contrary
to what he suggests, criticism does not emanate
solely from those specialists of the natural
sciences who would like to be the sole posses
sors of “true” science. Thus, for Bourdieu &
Wacquant
Professton is a word of ordinary language which has
been smuggled into scienti6c language; but it is above
ah a social construction, the product of an enthe social
labour of construction of a group and of a representa-
tion of this group, which has crept surreptitiously into
the science of the social world (1992, p. 212).
Actually, it seems difhcult to dispute this criti-
cism in the case of the early works on the pro-
fessions which resemble historiography more
than sociology when, with a certain compla-
cency, they relate the progressive construction
of a knowledge and of specific professionals, as
ifit were a matter of “functional” necessities for
guaranteeing the competence of producers on
markets where clients are illequipped to judge
the quality of the services on offer. But it also
7 My aim, therefore, is not to deal with all the professional fields, not only for reasons of jack of competence, but also
because it seems to me that this subject is too vast to permit any more than the statement of generalities which would only
reproduce the prejudices of common sense. gather, the choice of this narrower terrain of investigation Seems to me, in
spite of everything, pertinent for discussing the merits or limits of probkmatics like those of Perkins and Abbott. In the iirst
place because the field of business law is one of the sites of the questioning of the Welfare State, but also because several
professions are in dispute with each other over the market for legal-hnancial consuhancy.
EXPERTISE IN “PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY” 337
applies to critical approaches which, side-
stepping this hagiographic history, have ana-
lyzed the process of professionalization as a
strategy of power (Friedson, 1970) or the con-
struction of a monopoly (Larson, 1977; Abel &
Lewis, 1989). Certainly, it was considerable pro-
gess to have shown that the constitution of a
knowledge and a deontology, as also the estab-
lishment of authorities defining rules of entry,
arose as much from the protection of the pro
ducer’s interests as from a concern for the qual-
ity of consumers. But these demystifications did
not challenge fundamentally the carving up of
social reality worked out by and for the play of
professional interests. In a way, the distance
taken by these works with regard to pro-
fessional ideology made them even more effec-
tive - because more credible - in validating
and reinforcing the fundamental postulate of
this ideology, that is, the existence of a series
of professional identities as specific as they are
unchallengeable because “naturalized” by the
fact of the antiquity of their inscription in com-
mon sense and everyday vocabulary.
While taking diametricalIy opposed points of
view, functionalist and critical discourses
throw the same arguments at each other and
share out the roles. The diversity of profes-
sional spaces is such that a denunciation of
the dominant ideology can always serve as an
argument in struggles for power, in internal
disputes just as in the political field. Criticism
of established ideas is not only a proven means
for acquiring a reputation in the scientific field
[Ze chump sauunt], it is also often the basis for
a mutually profitable alliance between domi-
nated theoreticians and dominated practi-
tioners. Moreover, this does not prevent these
new approaches from otherwise contributing
to the progress of knowledge, while carrying
out a reactualization of scientific representa-
tions [reprhentatfons sauantes] so as to bring
them into line with the new balance of forces
in the field of practices.
If the 1970s saw a multiplication of critiques
of a functionalist representation of the profes
sions, as elitist as it is idealist, this is doubtless
because progressive expansion of recruitment
to higher education brought about the arrival
of new generations, in greater numbers and
with less social homogeneity, on the market
for expertise. These newcomers were not
well suited for an aristocratic and Malthusian
conception of professional practice which
linked the prestige of producers to their scar-
city and to the “quality” of their clients. The
expansion and social diversification of the cli-
entele, as also of the group of producers, could
not fail to promote an awareness with regard to
the discourse and deontological rules which
only strengthened the power built by the hier-
archs on a double strategy of scarcity and dis-
tance with regard to market preoccupations.
Reciprocally, this undertaking of scientific
[suvunte] demystification represented a not
inconsiderable asset in the offensive directed
by these “cadets” to get their “eiders” to ratify
new practices more in line with their aptitudes
and specific interests. The morphological trans-
formations of the field of expertise thus contain
in germ new scientific [savantes] representa-
tions which may constitute genuine progress
in knowledge of these milieux - even if their
author’s are usually blind to the reasons for this
lucidity.
It might be asked whether a similar process
is not being reproduced as a result of the pro-
found restructuring of the economic and poli-
tical landscape in the 1980s. Perhaps the major
difference is that the current transformation is
no longer only quantitative, but qualitative. It
is no longer only a matter of challenging a
Malthusian strategy of numew clausus,
hardly in line with the future of a mass con-
sumption on the market for expertise. In a
certain sense the stake is more fundamental
since it affects the mode of production of
expertise. The opening of borders speeds up
the transition of the “supermarkets” industry
from consultancy to enterprises. Owing to this
process of concentration, the whole division
of labour and the internal hierarchy of compe-
tences are affected, as also are the frontiers
between different know-hows or the posi-
tions they occupy in the field of power. At
the same time, the importance of the capitals
mobilized by these multinationals of expertise
- as well as the importance of the profits
they are liable TO generate - introduces finan-
cial rationality into professional milieux which
previously prided themselves on keeping their
distance from the logic of the market. The
pressure of the “bottom line” does not sit
weli with the ideal of collegiality. The corollary
of the recomposition of the economic land-
scape due to internationalization could thus be
a fundamental restructuring of the space of pro-
fessional know-how
- beginning, of course,
with those which come into closest contact
with the process of production and relations of
power, like law, management and accountancy.
This restructuring is all the more brutal as it
takes place from the inside, as an effect of
national fields for the production of expertise
becoming competitive. New technologies for
the circulation of information and the muhipli-
cation of multinational firms have introduced
the possibility of a delocalization of the produc-
tion of services. The international consultancy
conglomerates do not fail to exploit these
opportunites by encouraging their clients to
practise forum shopping. The phenomenon is
well known at the regulatory level. This is the
multiplication of tax havens or the processes of
deregulation in waves: the mini-bangs which
echo the big bang (Dezalay, 1993b), or over-
bidding to attract the market of international
commercial arbitrage (Dezaiay & Garth,
1993). But it is not only the legal or fiscal rules
which become competitive in this way, it is
also ail those which, to different degrees, con-
tribute to the elaboration (or redefinition) of
these regulatory frameworks, as well as to
their implementation (or circumvention). In
short, the entire mode of production and legit-
imation of professional know-how iiuds itself
implicated in this game of international compe-
tition (Dezalay & Trubek, 1993); in the world
of law just as on the consultancy market. In
fact, the different kinds of know-how are
tightly interwoven in the complex game
around these multiple regulatory devices, like
those which claim to guarantee free competi-
338 Y. DEWLAY
tion by forbidding dumping or monopoly prac-
tices, or more generally all those which work
towards enframing an activity of production or
exchange. The export - or import - of a
specific expertise is indissociable from the
export - or import - of the hierarchy of
know-ledge in which it is found to be
inscribed. Thus, to import the model of the
North American lawyer is implicitly to adopt a
social set-up which enables this professional
category to lay claim to the role of orchestra
conductor in muRidiscipRnary teams - as if
this leadership position was due to it by right.
Consequently, as a by-product, no know-how
can escape this international competition since
it affects not only its potential market, but also its
hierarchical position in the field of knowledge.
To complicate matters, since the different
national grids for sharing out roles on the
market for expertise rarely correspond with
each other, possibilities for poaching or occa-
sions for conflict multiply, as lawyers, accoun-
tants, tax experts and, more generally, all kinds
of consultants jostle each other at the bedside
of the enterprise. Thus, recent collapses of mul-
tinational companies have provided the oppor-
tunity for a confrontation between the British
and American models for taking responsibility
for companies in difficulty. The complication is
due to the fact that the former is inspired by
accountancy while the latter is highly legalistic.
Quite simply, the market is dominated in one
case by accountants and in the other by law-
yers. To be sure, whatever their family origin,
bankruptcy specialists pride themselves on
accumulating both orders of competence.
Nonetheless, however big the stakes, as in
the case of the great bankruptcies of tram+
national companies (Maxwell, Olympia and
York, for example) they have great dif%culty
in agreeing with each other, since each claims
to structure the whole apparatus of interven-
tion in their own way, the better to control
it. Recently this has reached the point of their
calling upon the good offices of a mediator, an
expert in interethnic conflicts.*
Happily, confrontations in the professional
* The case was that of Cyrus Vance who recently became famo~ concernitq the crisis in Yugoslavia.
EXPERTISE IN “PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY” 339
world remain largely symbolic. Perhaps this is
because the stakes in this rapidly expanding
market are mofe hlerarcbical than territorial.
The objective is not to eliminate the compet-
ing know-how, but to absorb it. As was said
expressively by one of the protagonists of the
offensive of Washington law firms in support of
recognition of multi-disciplinarity, the question
is “Who will be the leading cow?” (Dezalay,
1991). Competition between different,
national or international, fields of expertise
thus arises more from the “war of leaders
(chefs)” than from total war. Nevertheless, it
mobilizes a great many troops. In this race for
power, the victors are those who succeed in
building up their capital of transnational
renown by taking a leadership position in
highly visible, large international business.
From then on the concentration of resources
becomes a decisive factor. And the big British
practices enjoy a decisive advantage by virtue
of their size and age. So as not to see itself
relegated to the second rank, almost every-
where ln Europe the aristocracy of clerks is
thus led to devote itself in turn to a race for
expansion. So, rather than defending the tradi-
tional conception of a craft generalism, we see
certain leaders of professional bodies mobiliz-
ing their colleagues in the service of their per-
sonal ambitions, even if this means turning into
wage earners those who formerly were their
“fellows”. And transforming themselves at the
same time. By going from the status of ‘lprimus
fnter pares” to that of enterprise boss, these
clerks are, at the same time, obliged to adopt
an economic rationality in terms of profit that is
far removed from the ideal gentlemen’s profes-
sions. In this “palace revolution”, the modem-
ist fraction of the professional elite sacrifices on
the altar of the professional market a great deal
of the traditions and “habitus” constitutive of
the homogeneity and identity of national pro-
fessional fields. Clearly, it comes up against the
protests of the “guardians of the temple” who
are all the more vehement as their possibilities
of personal reconversion are limited. But the
position of these reformists is strong since,
rightly or wrongly, in an international confron-
tation between the multiple “tribes” of experts
given free rein by the dismemberment of
nation states, they seem to be “champions of
national know-how” to their peers.
“CLASSLESS CLASS” OR
INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF SOCIAL
HYPOCRISY?
To analyze these games of power and these
strategies for the reproduction of social capital
it is again necessary to have at one’s disposal
schemas of thought which do not conceal
them. Now we fmd here one of the principal
blindnesses of the scientific discourse [dfs-
tours savant] on the professions, which oper-
ates as if the ideal of collegiality and the cult of
knowledge automatically brackets off relations
of domination and social determinations. Perkin
explains the genesis of this blindness, while
partially succumbing to it himself. Professional
society, he tells us, is defined in opposition to
aristocracy; it is the outcome of the political
project of a middle class which seeks to abolish
privileges, but which also seeks to go beyond
class antagonisms. Neo-corporatism, merito-
cracy, the assumption of responsibility by the
State for fundamental needs like education and
health, and all those arrangements generated by
the professional society must, according to
their promoters, save capitalism from itself by
suppressing, if not classes themselves, then at
least the most violent manifestations of their
antagonisms. By putting itself forward as a
“classless class” (Perkin, 1989, p. 391) the
intellectual bourgeoisie legitimates itself as the
operator of mediation and social pacification.
Its emblematic figures, Iike that of the intellec-
tual or the expert, play a central role in this
political project: they put their competence in
the service of different social interests for
which they would be the spokesmen. But to
be credible to their constituents, these “social
engineers” must themselves go beyond their
class origins in order to become “free-floating
mental operators set apart from their social
origins” (ibid., p. 391).
340 Y. DEWLAY
That being the case, we can better under-
stand why scientific discourse [dfsco~rs
savant] on the professions remains almost
totally silent on these class phenomena. What
is at stake is the entire credibility of the enter-
prise of social mediation in which these
experts are involved. There is therefore a
very strong taboo surrounding the question of
social origins. But it is much more easily
respected if it is strongly interiorized by aca-
demics who are both products and producers
of the ideology of a meritocratic society. As
Domhoff (1983) observed, North American
sociologists are predisposed to blind them-
selves to the determinations of social origins
since they are actively involved in an under-
taking which aims to Emit their effects. More
precisely, they are involved in converting these
social privileges into hierarchies of skill. Even
if, in so doing, it means taking into this new
elite a small minority of exceptionally talented
individuals from more disadvantaged groups.
As Bourdieu (1989, p. 140ff.) has shown, the
educational reproduction of social stratifica-
tions arises from a statistical logic: it eliminates
some of the “less endowed” of the “heirs” the
better to ensure the reproduction of the estab
lishment as a whole, by giving it every appear-
ance of being a meritocracy. However, this
general rule, which ensures a correspondence
between social hierarchies and educational
hierarchies, must not be seen as an inviolable
achievement. Teachers labour to make educa-
tional training and selection more rigorous, and
they can count on the political support of the
entire educated band of the middle class con-
cerned with developing its capital of skill in the
face of possessors of an economic or relational
capital. Thus, when the spokesperson of the
professional world denies the weight of social
determinations, as if meritocracy had achieved
a definitive triumph, to a great extent their aim
rises from the “self-fuUillmg prophecy”. By
concealing them, they tend in fact to disqualify
the privileges of birth as outmoded archaisms.
Perkin, no more than others, does not escape
these blinding effects linked to his academic
condition: he identities himself with a meritoc-
racy the advances of which he overestimates
because he considers them to be as legitimate
as they are ineluctable. Even if he sometimes
distances himself condescendingly from those
“modem samurai” who would be “lone intel-
lectual(s) raised above the crowd by their
talent” (Perkin, 1989, p. 391) he readily
admits that he has always thought that the
“professional middle class” constituted a
“whole ready-made class of potential cranks”
who are defined as individuals prepared to
espouse the interests of a class other than their
own (ibid., p. 438). Therefore he hardly chal-
lenges this idealized representation of a
“classless class” devoting itself to limiting the
privileges of capital or birth in order to reduce
social antagonisms. Certainly, he recognizes
that, after the great leap forward of social uni-
formization resulting from the war effort and
subsequent reconstruction, the institutionaliza-
tion of social compromise has been very diffi-
cult. But, according to him, this semi-failure
should be imputed just as much to the persis-
tance of “class archaisms” and the pressures of
international competition as to the arrogance
of these high priests of social pacification or
their internal disputes.
By taking up again for his own purposes this
myth of the professional, who escapes the
determinations of his social origins thanks to
this knowledge, Perkin not only helps to rein-
force a mystification which is fundamental to
the symbolic power of these experts, he also
prevents himself from analyzing how relations
of domination are reproduced at the very heart
of a professional society. For this reason, it is
impossible for him to explain the paradox of a
professional society which is tom apart even
though it is at its peak. He is content with a
description which is above all a product of
denunciation. The historian then gives way
before the polemicist. Just as he is verbose
when it is a question of describing the setting
up of a welfare state which develops in total
symbiosis with the ideals of the professional
society, so he is reticent when it is a question
of explaining the social and professional bases
on which the neo-liberal movement is con-
EXPERTISE IN “PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY” 341
strutted. And no doubt he is being somewhat
hasty in his task when he limits himself to cit-
ing Reich, for whom “paper entrepreneurial-
ism is the bastard child of scientijk
management” (ibid., p. 503).
Instead of a reminder of Hayek’s theses and a
somewhat facile denunciation of Thatcher&e
doctrines and the cupidity of people like
Boesky or Saunders, one would have liked to
know the path which led from these theories
to these practices. In the same way, by what
sort of “miracle” have these generations of
labour relations organizers, some of whom
aspired to being a sort of “priesthood in indus
try” (p. 304) given birth to these “modem
missionaries of free exchange”, the yuppies
of law and finance? What has changed in the
structure of the enterprise to explain this
transition from one type of specialist to
another? On all these points, alas, the analysis
is somewhat short. This threatens to weaken
considerably the central thesis of a profes-
sional society which would brutally tear itself
apart, even though it is at its peak and nothing,
or almost nothing, in his analysis leads us to
expect this break up. The existence of a back-
lash against the social state can hardly be
denied. But to understand the success of this
movement it would be necessary first of all to
distance oneself from the idealized representa-
tion of a professional society having gone
beyond its class origins the better to devote
itself to the great work of social pacification.
That would have enabled him to break with the
myth of a professional society as socially homo-
geneous as it is monolithic in its political
project.
On the contrary, as the works of Pierre Bour-
dieu have shown, it is the relative diversity of
social origins represented in the professions
which makes it possible for symbolic fields
like law or the university to claim to represent
the diversity of positions and social strategies.
Moreover, it is the play of internal conflicts
between individuals occupying different posi-
tions in the field which makes possible a per-
manent adjustment of the fields political
positions to the transformation of relations of
forces in the social field. The latter develop
with greater ease if these professionals occupy
positions in the middle which enable them to
play different roles successively or, indeed,
simultaneously. These professionals are more
than just “social cranks”, above all they are
professionals of the double game. Lawyers pro-
vide the best example of these professionals
whose “institutional schizophrenia” (Gordon,
1984) makes them perfect “guardians of collec-
tive hypocrisy” (Bourdieu, 1991). Their effec-
tiveness as mediators is due precisely to the
fact that in their practice they succeed in pro
ducing a coexistence between the ideology of
public service and the logic of profit. To para-
phrase Weber, these clerks are above all
“merchants and social peace”. In line with
the adage “doing well by doing good”, they
produce profits by doing good: their market
value is a direct function of the capital of
civic virtue and honorability that they have
accumulated and from which they enable
their clients to profit. Playing on two tables
in no way prevents them, depending on the
political conjuncture or their own strategies,
from bringing to the fore now one and now
the other of these two complementary facets
of their talent.
Thus, the ideological fracture at the heart of
the professional society that Perkin presents as
a new phenomenon is doubtless only an episo-
dic manifestation of this structural duality of
the field of experts serving power. Rather
than a fundamental ideological turnaround, it
is doubtless only a matter of a readjustment
of the themes of the dominant discourse in
order to bring them more into line with a dis
placement of relations of force taking place
simultaneously in the economic and profes-
sional fields. In this way both are brought
closer together. We have shown already how
international competition obliges the heirs of
the noblesse de robe gradually to convert
themselves into bosses of service enterprises
who are all the more eager to promote the
merits of economic rationality as they are
obliged to put it into practice in their profes-
sional life. Equally, it could be shown how
342 Y. DEWLAY
transformations of the political field have
entailed the reconversion of hiers of the lndus
vial and financial bourgeoisie into profes-
sionals of management, at the same time
introducing the logic of capital into the scien-
tific field [champ savant] and therefore, a
forti ort, into the professional field.
Paradoxically, it is perhaps the relative suc-
cess of those promoting a more meritocratic
logic which has provided the basis for those
transformations which result in the ideal of
social justice they claim to embody now being
challenged. In fact, as Bourdieu has shown, the
increasingly universal recognition of educa-
tional qualifications has obliged the families of
the industrial or financial bourgeoisie to seek in
turn this type of scientific legitimacy [GgW
mfte’ suvunte] that previously they had rather
neglected. Hence an increased competition
which is combined with strivings from autono-
mlzation by producers of the scientific field
[chump savant] so as to intensify educational
competition. These pressures have encouraged
the development of what are called “sheltered
schools” [&oZes refuges]. Business or manage-
ment schools, which have proliferated over the
last 20 years, are the prime example of these
institutions: by according academic status to
qualifications transmitted essentially by the
social milieu, they provide these familial strate-
gies with the means to escape a verdict which
is too narrowly educational (Bourdleu, 1989, p.
328). Through them, the business bourgeoisie
enters foursquare In the field of knowledge
and expertise. In so doing it Introduces its eco-
nomic rationality into the universe of clerks
which, with greater or lesser success, pre-
viously had tried to preserve their relative
autonomy with regard to those possessing
economic power.
It might be objected that this strategy of
reconversion is explained by the existence of
an educational system, as imbued with its tradl-
tions as it is strongly imbricated ln the State,
which has produced those French pecullarltles
- the intellectuals (Charle, 1990), the
“grundes t%oZes” or the “nobl esse &Et&‘.
However, this is far from being an isolated
example. It has been observed already by Balt-
zell(l964) that the hiers of the robber barons
became professionals by going on to acquire
diplomas - and legitimacy - ln colleges
richly endowed by their fathers. The academic
qualification is a privileged way of galnlng
access to social respectability. It ls also one of
the most effective ways of sheltering the family
capital from economic or political hazards,’ by
securing for it the durability and universality of
a professional know-how. It is therefore not by
chance that, owing to the crisis and the lnter-
nationalization of economies, there is an accel-
eration of those strategies of conversion. In a
context in which family enterprises often have
no alternative to bankruptcy except fusion ln a
big group, possession of a qualification makes it
easier for the heirs to capitalize their relations
or their experience as entrepreneurs. It faclli-
tates their redeployment as a director of one of
the subsidiaries of the conglomerate which
absorbs their patrimony. The success of some
in this new career is such that they benefit
from a double, patrlomonlal and academic,
legitimacy. Moreover, the market value of the
latter increases greatly in a period of restructur-
ing and internationalization. By destroylng the
local lndustrlal fabric, the crisis accordingly
reduces the extent and importance of the net-
work of relations that constituted a good part
of the social capital of these family entrepre-
neurs. Inversely, the complexity and fluidity
of a global market requires precisely the formal
type of rationality and would-be universally
valld skills that the educational system excels
at producing. An international market, ln
which partners are often as socially distant
from each other as they are geographically,
could not function like those closed and stable
mllieux ruled by the adage “my word is my
bond”. The handshake turns out to be quite
insufiicient for llmlting the risks implied by
this new type of transaction, and from now on
commercial partners prefer extremely detailed
contracts which demand armies of lawyers and
accountants. To lay claim to the role of broker
in the economic field one must now have at
one’s disposal a solid baggage of expertise.
EXPERTISE IN “PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY” 343
acceleration of international economic restruc-
turing, the business bourgeoisie rediscovers
the advantages of academic qualifications
which can easily be exported and capitalized.
At once, it rejoins the ranks of a “professional
society” which, in part, was defined outside of,
if not against, it. This, it seems to us, is what
explains the paradox, noted by Perkin, of a
professional society whose triumph just pre-
cedes its break-up and a radical change of
view in relation to the ideals of its founding
fathers. The expansion of professional know-
how makes it henceforth one of the privileged
sites of the reproduction of social capital. From
now on the heirs of the business bourgeoisie
invest massively in the field of expertise and
learning; in virtue of this, the latter increas-
ingly tends to merge with the sites and institu-
tions where economic power is - legitimately
-
exercised. This, perhaps, is the moment for
the sociology of the professions to abandon its
“provincialism” - and its illusions - so as to
come to terms with itself as one of the compo-
nents of a sociology of the reproduction of
relations of power in the field of knowledge
and expertise.
Translated by Graham Burchell.
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doc_477745316.pdf
This article offers a critical reflection on the theses of Pe&n (Ibe Rise of Bofessional Society: England
Since 1880, London: Routledge, 1989) and Abbott (l’be System of Apfessions, Chicago: University of
Chicago FVcss, 19&Q, and compares these with empirIcaI observations conducted by the author
(Lkzalay, 1991, Modem hw RevceW; 1992, Marcbands de droit, la restwcturution de l’o&rs jutjdique
intsrnutfonulpar les multinationalesd u dtwft,P aris: Payard) on the internationaml arketf or business
k+w.
Acwunthg, OrgPnl zati otu and Soci ety, Vol . 20, NO. 5, PP. 331-344, 1995
El sevi er Sdence Ltd. Printed in Great Britain
0361~3652/95 $9.5o+o.00
“TURF BATIkE! OR “CLASS STRUGGLES”: THE INTERNATIONALI2XTION OF
THE MARKET FOR FXPERTISE IN THE “PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY”
YVES DEZALAY
Cenfre de Soci ol ogi c rl e L’Educati on el de ka Cul ture, Mai son des Sci ences de l ’tl omme, Pari s
This article offers a critical reflection on the theses of Pe&n (Ibe Ri se of Bofessi onal Soci ety: Engl and
Si nce 1880, London: Routledge, 1989) and Abbott (l’be System of Apfessi ons, Chi cago: University of
Chicago FVcss, 19&Q, and compares these with empirIcaI observations conducted by the author
(Lkzalay, 1991, Modem hw RevceW; 1992, Marcbands de droi t, l a restwcturuti on de l ’o&rs jutjdi que
i ntsrnutfonul par l es mul ti nati onal es du dtwft, Pari s: Payard) on the i nternati onal market for business
k+w. As a way of illuminating the world of the professionals, the article begins by emphasi&g how
macro&wry and micro-sociology complement and compete with each other; in the lirst, the profes-
sionaI society appears as the motor and product of the WeIfarc State; in the second, it is the permanent
confrontations between sum&s which contributes to a continuaI redcfintkm of these &Ids of practices.
These two dimensions are inherent in, if not exacerbated by, the opening of frontiers. However, both
approaches negkct the effects of class: the recruitment practices and sodal authority of these merent
groups of professionab. These fiekls symbolic power are also one of the prlndpaI sites of reproduction
- and of hierarchization - of the different forms of sodaI capital. It is perhaps there that one should
seek the expIanation for the paradox noted by Perkin: that the shattering of a professionaI society
coincides with its triumph, or at least its gewtalization.
To attempt to think about social objects such as
the State or the professions which present
themselves as natural, is to risk analyzing them
according to conceptual categories constructed
by and for these institutions. As a way of escap
ing this effect of redundance, an effect that is
bound up with the correspondence between
objective structures and cognitive structures,
Bourdieu suggests that “there is doubtless no
more powerful instrument of breach [nrpture]
than genetic reconstruction”, which makes pos
sible the identification of “excluded possibili-
ties” (1993, p. 51). In the absence of this
delicate exercise of going back to original con-
frontations, perhaps crises provide a substitute.
This is because, very often, they reactivate
them. At the very least, breaks or discrepancies
between practices and representations brought
about by crises are conducive to greater clarity
(Nelson et al ., 1992), which itself may be
enhanced by an historical approach.
Thus, challenges to the Welfare State by those
adhering to the neo-liberal ideology almost
everywhere encourage researchers to ponder
the origins of this form of institutionalization
of social compromise (Bayer, 1986; Weir et
al ., 1988). Harold Perkin (1989) finds these ori-
gins in the expansion of a professional society
which progressively substitutes its scientific
rationality [rati on&k5 suuantel and merito-
cratic logic for class antagonisms. But this tri-
umph of knowledge is a pyrrhic victory.
According to Perkin (19891, the professional
society is condemned to political impotence
by its internal quarrels. Henceforth, to the sec-
tarian jealousies of different kinds of know-how
there is added a widening gulf between profes-
sionals of the public sector and those of the
private sector. In this civil war between
experts, exacerbated by the recession and inter-
national competition, extremists on each side
paradoxically rediscover the strains of the class
331
332 Y. DEWLAY
struggle from which they borrow much of their
rhetoric. They risk forgetting that their success
was based upon their complementarity:
hitherto, an improvement of social protection
was corollary of the advance of productive
rationality.
TOWARDS A “DUAL PROFESSIONAL
SOCIETY”?
Should we see in these alarmist theses
merely a rhetorical argument which seeks to
arouse Perkin’s compatriots, before it is too
late, to check the rout of the ideal of a more
egalitarian, caring and compassionate society
(p. 518) supported, according to him, by pro-
fessionals of the public sector? To what extent
is this very pessimistic diagnosis tied to the
specificity of the British model’ of a “capital-
ism divided” (higham, 1984), striving to man-
age, so to speak, the social effects of an
industrial decline as inevitable as it is accele-
rated by the international ambitions of the
City? But in that case, does this meticulous
description not also offer a sort of prefigura-
tion of what is taking place, to a greater or
lesser extent, in all post-industrial societies,
especially those in which the elites endeavour
to reconvert their domination of national struc-
tures of industrlal production into a mastery of
this nascent international market of legal-flnan-
cial expertise? Such developments may entail a
speeding up of the process of a delocalization
of industrial activity, the social cost of which
already makes itself heavily felt ln terms of
unemployment and the exclusion of a growing
fraction of the population of Western societies.
To this extent, the split in professional society
brought to light by Perkin would be only the
mufEed echo of a more serious division, that of
a dual society where, especially in the great
metropolitan financial centres, poverty and
misery surround the enclaves of power and
wealth created by the new generations of
young urban professionals (Sassen, 1991).
This is not the only lesson that can be drawn
from the analysis of British professional society
advanced by Perkin. Anyone interested in pro
fessional phenomena can find material for
reflection here. In particular, he emphasizes
the existence of oppositions of interests that
until now professional ideology has striven to
conceal, but that the aggravation of inter-
national competition is in the process of bring-
ing into the full light of day. Perhaps because,
despite its title, this work is not inscribed in the
sphere of scientitic discourse [dfscours savant]
on the professions, it escapes quarrels over
definitions,’ as it escapes also the usual taboos
of this kind of literature, especially the one
which postulates the homogeneity, if not the
uniformity, of these different professional
milieux. This division between partisans of
market freedom and defenders of a “non-
market” public sector, to which he draws our
attention, hardly matches the professional
classifications we are used to, such as law, med-
icine or education. Everything suggests that
these attitudes concerning the market and com-
petition induce a kind of split which brings the
relative political homogeneity of these pro-
fessional milieux into question.3 It is, then, pre-
cisely this discordance between status and
’ In fact, this hypothesis of a division of the “professional society” between public and private sectors scarcely applies to
countries like France where professional elites circulate cheerfully from one to the other (Marceau, 1989) or to the United
States where, according to Gordon (1984) they “sutTer” a kind of “institutional schizophrenia” (cf. Auetbach, 1986).
* See, for example, the questions raised by the application to Germany of this concept of profession, as conceived by
North American sociology (Cocks % Jarausch, 1990, p. 10; McClelland, 1991).
3 Nonetheless, ifwe take the example of law, this split is not produced along the lines of the public-private opposition, but
between big firms working for the international market and small practices concerned almost exclusively with the
everyday problems of a clientele of individti property tmnmctions, divorce, traflic accidents. . What is in the process
of taking shape suggests, rather, a divergence of mtetests between defenders of national traditions and partisans of entry
on to the big international market.
EXPERTISE IN “PROFESSIONAL SOCIEIY 333
strategic options which gives this interrogation
its heuristic merit, while making its use diffi-
cult. Perkin himself has great difficulty in
making clear the line of demarcation
between these two groups whose antagonism
does not, as he sometimes implies, come down
to an opposition between the public and the
private. Perhaps this difficulty is due to the fact
that this political division itself could well be
just one of the premonitory signs of a recom-
position of different professional fields; a
recomposition accelerated by an economic
restructuring inaugurated by the oil crises
and, throughout the 1980s many of whose
protagonists were recruited from within these
fields of expertise (Moran, 1991; Dezalay,
1993b; Lederman, 1992).
“TURF BATTLES” OR “GANG WARS”
Thus it may not be a mere coincidence that,
at the end of this decade, an American sociol-
ogist published a book on the “system of the
professions” (Abbott, 1988) which, in many
respects, echoes this finding of a profoundly
fragmented and divided British professional
society. In both cases the professional world
is presented as a battlefield. But, where the
historian sees essentially an ideological and fra-
tricidal confrontation between two camps as
the occasion for civil or religious wars, the
sociologist takes his inspiration from the
quasi-permanent skirmishes engaged in by
urban gangs in order to redefine their respec-
tive territories. The confrontation is less fratri-
tidal than interprofessional; rather than being
self-destructive, it is, on the contrary, funda-
mental to a self-regulation of this “ecosystem
of the professions”.
By proposing this highIy Darwinist interpre-
tation of a struggle for survival, in which the
victorious professional “species” is the one
best adapted, or most adaptable to transforma-
tion of their environment, Abbott sidesteps
functionalist theses which restrict themselves
to reproducing in scientific terms [en termes
suvunts] - and thus to objectivizing - the
universalist ideology which makes the profes
sional model the best possible answer to needs
as fundamental as they are immanent. Law and
medicine provide the archetype of this idea-
lized representation of a policed universe in
which the cult of knowledge [suvoir] and con-
viviality combine harmoniously with the voca-
tion of public service so as to keep at arm’s
length material and vulgar preoccupations
unworthy of these gentlemen’s professions.
On the contrary, in the schema advanced by
Abbott, competition rules, and it is all the
more ferocious for being without, or almost
without, rules. The territorial wrangles he
describes evoke the laws of the jungle more
than those of honour. The organizational
principle of this milieu is not “noblesse
oblige” but the law of the strongest or the will
to survive. In fact, this model is inspired overtly
by the observation of street gangs which estab-
lished the reputation of the Chicago school of
sociology.
It might seem incongruous, if not out of
place, to bring together these two worlds
which are poles apart in social space. Actu-
ally, it is. At least, it is in the strict sense of
the term; for it is this transposition of an
approach and of conceptual categories elabo-
rated to account for another social milieu
which gives this analysis its heuristic force. It
surprises, it shocks, for it reverses alI the con-
ventions of common sense which tend to pre-
sent the professional universe as the triumph of
rationality and civility. But in so doing it reveals
the unspoken of this common sense. Its icono-
clastic aspect is precisely what enables it to
breach the defences that these fields of power
erect against an objective knowledge by impos-
ing on those who claim to analyse them read-
ing grids which are the basis of their symbolic
power in the social space. Since these experts
produce rationality and civility, there is a ten-
dency to see them - and for them to present
themselves - as if they were the most exemp
lary manifestation of these qualities. Thus,
before the big bung turned them into conglom-
erates of professional mercenaries in the ser-
vice of big financial interests, law firms were
334 Y. DEULAY
quite ready to boast of being “the most perfect
example as well as the iinal refuge of Athenian
democracy”. It has been possible to sustain this
myth, very useful for their legitimacy, to the
extent that the temples of knowledge and
power have remained sufficiently opaque to
the profane. The exacerbation of international
and interprofessional competition has led these
enterprises to enter into a politics of commu-
nication (by attracting public relations specia-
lists and by sustaining a burgeoning trade
press) in order to promote other images, like
that of the expert who does not hesitate to
display “creative imagination” in order to
defend his client’s interests “aggressively”
(Eisler, 1990).
This example suggests that the success of
this demystifying analysis is no doubt also due
to its timeliness. “Casino capitalism” (Strange,
1986) and aggravation of international eco-
nomic war renders somewhat outmoded the
idealized representation which made the pro
fessions the guardians of spiritual power who,
having by their function an excess of virtue, are
like worthy successor’s of medieval clerks.
Actually, the smug picture of the activities of
the modern yuppies of finance and law offered
to us by the practitioners themselves (Lewis,
1989; Lederman, 1992) together with journal-
istic investigations devoted to unravelling the
structures of junk bond markets (Stewart,
1991) or the mechanisms for laundering dirty
money (Eing & Frantz, 1992; Truell & Gurwin,
1992), give an image of professional practices
closer to gang warfare than to the practices of
monastic cloisters.
The new skirmishes in the war of law and
figures (Dezalay, 1991, 1993~) - one of
whose protagonists, the senior partner of one
of the big six, publicly invites legal clerks to
“leave their cloisters in order to become busi-
nessmen”* - are situated at the same level.
And this does not concern only the profes-
sionals close to business milieux. As is shown
by research on AIDS, the world of medical
research is hardly spared by this virus of
cross-border competition which jusititles
every appetite as well as every excess. Even
so, are we dealing with a recent phenom-
enon, brought to light, but also aggravated
by, international competition? Is the crisis of
the professions a corollary of the economic
crisis? Is the revival of tribal wars in the world
of expertise an effect of the dismemberment of
the State? This last hypothesis, which remains
quite attractive,’ leads to a combination of Per-
kin’s and Abbott’s contributions. This conver-
gence also emphasizes what seems to us to be
one of the principal gaps in the latter’s analysis:
whereas, for the historian, the professional
society is at the centre of transformations of
the field of power, this political dimension is
almost entirely absent from the system of the
professions.
However, Abbott himself leans on history,
but as a sociologist rather than historian. He
makes ample use of history in order to show
that interprofessional poaching is endemic and
proliferates at the slightest opportunity. Cer-
tainly, these openings or “discoveries”, which
enable pioneers of the professions to colonize
new territories of influence, may be more or
less numerous according to the epoch or sec-
tors of activity. But no doubt because he wants
to avoid at any price falling into the trap of
evolutionism, which for a long time has been
one of the major characteristics of scientific
discourse [dticours suuunt] on the profes
sions, whether functionalist or critical, he is
very careful to avoid suggesting anything that
might resemble an explanation in terms of
macro-bistorical processes.
In a way one could say that for Abbott there
is no history in the sense of the long-term
[longue dutiel; there are only constantly
changing circumstances without it being pos-
sible to identify directing principles either in
political history or in the history of modes of
4 Cf. Wachman, R., Wffl hvycrs sacrifice their professional vows?, Accountanqv Age (1989).
5 And that we have tried to apply to the intanati~tion of the market for business law @e~alay, 1993a).
EXPERTISE IN “PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY” 335
production. If he draws frequently upon
examples from the history of the professions,
this is only the better to show that this history
is constantly being replayed. New professions
are born while others die or are transformed.
But all of this takes place in a relatively decen-
tralized, if not chaotic way, without the effect
of major social transformations like the expan-
sion of the university,6 or the development of
State intervention - and so, u fortrorf, chal-
lenges arising from internationalization -
being clearly discernible. His model is de-his-
toricized because it is de-politicized: the pro
fessional system he depicts seems to be almost
disconnected from social and political history.
The relations that this “system” maintains
with other neighbouring social fields, like the
State or politics or the production of knowl-
edge, are nowhere presented in a systematic
way. However, relations between different pro-
fessions are far from being restricted to territor-
ial confrontations. An implicit hierarchy exists
which takes account of the positions of differ-
ent professions in the field of power and
knowledge. These statutory differences do no
more than translate the importance of the
social or scientific capital [cu@tdZ stunt] they
have accumulated. Prestige and age usually go
together. This stratification is manifested -
and constantly reinforced - on the occasion
of the recruitment of new entrants. The most
“noble” professions attract the best endowed
“heirs” as well as the most brilliant - or most
ambitious d “arrW.stes”. The choice of these
applicants is easily explained. They know that
by aspiring to a particularly prestigious profes-
sional title they will benefit automatically from
the collective capital of renown that it repre-
sents. In return, all of their colleagues will
profit from the eagerness of these newcomers
to advance their career by expanding the field
of influence of the know-how they have chosen.
According to the logic of the corps, individual
success is conditioned by the group’s social
renown, and vice versa.
To be sure, this system of hierarchical posi-
tions is far from being inviolable. Just as in the
social field, concurrent principles of hierarchi-
zation, which are complementary as well as
antagonistic, exist in the professional world.
It is the old struggle for temporal and spiritual
power continuing today between the financial
bourgeoisie and the intellectual bourgeoisie.
The many links between Oxbridge and the
City in no way exclude jealousies or antagon-
isms between the hierarchies of money and
knowledge. Parallel to the territorial struggles
for occupation of new markets, struggles take
place continuously for power and prestige
which have their own logic and contribute at
least as much to the transformation of the pro
fessional landscape. However, these symbolic
struggles cannot be analyzed without taking
into account the social history of the political
field in which the principles of classification
and hierarchization, around which the diier-
ent fractions of the establishment confront
each other, are constantly redefined. In short,
it seems to us that Abbott, by refusing to situate
himself within the framework of a political his-
tory, is condemned to leave uncompleted his
project of “thinking rationally” about the sys-
tem of the professions.
One can certainly see here a deliberate
choice, no doubt inspired as much by the tradi-
tional terrain of the Chicago school of soci-
ology as by a (justified) distrust of a sociology
of the professions which has greatly abused
pseudo-historical explanations. To get out of
this impasse, like Perkin we must bring the
political dimension back into the professional
field. Moreover, the present context of the
internationalization of the market for expertise
especially lends itself to this. To understand the
game of competition between the different
national professional fields it is necessary to
take into account what each of them owes to
the position it occupies in a space of power,
which is no more than the product of the social
history of these diierent nations. As is shown
o He notes, however, but in conclusion, that the expansion of access to higher education produces a banaRmion of
eq=- @. 317%
336 Y. DEWLAY
by current commercial negotiations, whether
global or regional, the delocalization of the
market for services transforms “turf battles”
Into international confrontations in which pro-
fessional groups do not hesitate to mobilize all
the political capital they have at their disposal.
Thus, in this new context, to follow Abbott’s
approach, we should accord much more
importance than he does to the diversity of
national forms of the structuration of this field
of power.
This requires that we re-centre analysis on
the role of these professions in strategies for
the reproduction of elites. This is because the
professional field plays a central role in the
mechanism of reproduction of social hier-
archies that is also strongly affected by an open-
ing of borders, the corollary of which is a
reconversion of national elites into a transna-
tional elite. The importance of the stakes and
the difficulties of the undertaking explain those
behaviours, as opportunist as they are mercan-
tilist, that have been noted by a good many
observers. If competition becomes increas-
ingly exacerbated and confrontations multiply
in these universes of gentlemen who valorize
collegiality or “art for art’s sake”, it is because
it is not only a matter of territorial struggles
but, above all perhaps, of struggles for power.
What is at stake is a redefinition, on an inter-
national scale, of a whole series of pecki ng
orders established - and more or less stabi-
lized - on a national basis. It is therefore not
only the small minority of applicants for entry
into this future transnational elite who feel con-
cerned by such a stake, but also all of their
fellows or colleagues whose symbolic capital
risks Iinding itself brutally devalued or reva-
lued on the new International market of profes-
sional qualifications in the process of being
constituted. These are the themes that we
would like to sketch out by using the analysis
of strategies of social reproduction presented
in La Nobl esse d’Etat (Bourdieu, 1989) as
well as our own research in Marcbands de
droi t (Dezalay, 1992) and on the intemationa-
lization of the legal field.’ But before trying to
reintroduce this reflection in terms of social
determinisms and strategies of reproduction of
bourgeois elites, almost totally absent from the
scientific [savant] discourse on the professions,
we must consider the reason for this blindness.
“ORGANIZED PREJUDICE”
More than any other discipline, the sociology
of the professions merits Perkin’s harsh judge-
ment likening social science to “organized pre-
judice” @. 397). However, in this case, contrary
to what he suggests, criticism does not emanate
solely from those specialists of the natural
sciences who would like to be the sole posses
sors of “true” science. Thus, for Bourdieu &
Wacquant
Professton is a word of ordinary language which has
been smuggled into scienti6c language; but it is above
ah a social construction, the product of an enthe social
labour of construction of a group and of a representa-
tion of this group, which has crept surreptitiously into
the science of the social world (1992, p. 212).
Actually, it seems difhcult to dispute this criti-
cism in the case of the early works on the pro-
fessions which resemble historiography more
than sociology when, with a certain compla-
cency, they relate the progressive construction
of a knowledge and of specific professionals, as
ifit were a matter of “functional” necessities for
guaranteeing the competence of producers on
markets where clients are illequipped to judge
the quality of the services on offer. But it also
7 My aim, therefore, is not to deal with all the professional fields, not only for reasons of jack of competence, but also
because it seems to me that this subject is too vast to permit any more than the statement of generalities which would only
reproduce the prejudices of common sense. gather, the choice of this narrower terrain of investigation Seems to me, in
spite of everything, pertinent for discussing the merits or limits of probkmatics like those of Perkins and Abbott. In the iirst
place because the field of business law is one of the sites of the questioning of the Welfare State, but also because several
professions are in dispute with each other over the market for legal-hnancial consuhancy.
EXPERTISE IN “PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY” 337
applies to critical approaches which, side-
stepping this hagiographic history, have ana-
lyzed the process of professionalization as a
strategy of power (Friedson, 1970) or the con-
struction of a monopoly (Larson, 1977; Abel &
Lewis, 1989). Certainly, it was considerable pro-
gess to have shown that the constitution of a
knowledge and a deontology, as also the estab-
lishment of authorities defining rules of entry,
arose as much from the protection of the pro
ducer’s interests as from a concern for the qual-
ity of consumers. But these demystifications did
not challenge fundamentally the carving up of
social reality worked out by and for the play of
professional interests. In a way, the distance
taken by these works with regard to pro-
fessional ideology made them even more effec-
tive - because more credible - in validating
and reinforcing the fundamental postulate of
this ideology, that is, the existence of a series
of professional identities as specific as they are
unchallengeable because “naturalized” by the
fact of the antiquity of their inscription in com-
mon sense and everyday vocabulary.
While taking diametricalIy opposed points of
view, functionalist and critical discourses
throw the same arguments at each other and
share out the roles. The diversity of profes-
sional spaces is such that a denunciation of
the dominant ideology can always serve as an
argument in struggles for power, in internal
disputes just as in the political field. Criticism
of established ideas is not only a proven means
for acquiring a reputation in the scientific field
[Ze chump sauunt], it is also often the basis for
a mutually profitable alliance between domi-
nated theoreticians and dominated practi-
tioners. Moreover, this does not prevent these
new approaches from otherwise contributing
to the progress of knowledge, while carrying
out a reactualization of scientific representa-
tions [reprhentatfons sauantes] so as to bring
them into line with the new balance of forces
in the field of practices.
If the 1970s saw a multiplication of critiques
of a functionalist representation of the profes
sions, as elitist as it is idealist, this is doubtless
because progressive expansion of recruitment
to higher education brought about the arrival
of new generations, in greater numbers and
with less social homogeneity, on the market
for expertise. These newcomers were not
well suited for an aristocratic and Malthusian
conception of professional practice which
linked the prestige of producers to their scar-
city and to the “quality” of their clients. The
expansion and social diversification of the cli-
entele, as also of the group of producers, could
not fail to promote an awareness with regard to
the discourse and deontological rules which
only strengthened the power built by the hier-
archs on a double strategy of scarcity and dis-
tance with regard to market preoccupations.
Reciprocally, this undertaking of scientific
[suvunte] demystification represented a not
inconsiderable asset in the offensive directed
by these “cadets” to get their “eiders” to ratify
new practices more in line with their aptitudes
and specific interests. The morphological trans-
formations of the field of expertise thus contain
in germ new scientific [savantes] representa-
tions which may constitute genuine progress
in knowledge of these milieux - even if their
author’s are usually blind to the reasons for this
lucidity.
It might be asked whether a similar process
is not being reproduced as a result of the pro-
found restructuring of the economic and poli-
tical landscape in the 1980s. Perhaps the major
difference is that the current transformation is
no longer only quantitative, but qualitative. It
is no longer only a matter of challenging a
Malthusian strategy of numew clausus,
hardly in line with the future of a mass con-
sumption on the market for expertise. In a
certain sense the stake is more fundamental
since it affects the mode of production of
expertise. The opening of borders speeds up
the transition of the “supermarkets” industry
from consultancy to enterprises. Owing to this
process of concentration, the whole division
of labour and the internal hierarchy of compe-
tences are affected, as also are the frontiers
between different know-hows or the posi-
tions they occupy in the field of power. At
the same time, the importance of the capitals
mobilized by these multinationals of expertise
- as well as the importance of the profits
they are liable TO generate - introduces finan-
cial rationality into professional milieux which
previously prided themselves on keeping their
distance from the logic of the market. The
pressure of the “bottom line” does not sit
weli with the ideal of collegiality. The corollary
of the recomposition of the economic land-
scape due to internationalization could thus be
a fundamental restructuring of the space of pro-
fessional know-how
- beginning, of course,
with those which come into closest contact
with the process of production and relations of
power, like law, management and accountancy.
This restructuring is all the more brutal as it
takes place from the inside, as an effect of
national fields for the production of expertise
becoming competitive. New technologies for
the circulation of information and the muhipli-
cation of multinational firms have introduced
the possibility of a delocalization of the produc-
tion of services. The international consultancy
conglomerates do not fail to exploit these
opportunites by encouraging their clients to
practise forum shopping. The phenomenon is
well known at the regulatory level. This is the
multiplication of tax havens or the processes of
deregulation in waves: the mini-bangs which
echo the big bang (Dezalay, 1993b), or over-
bidding to attract the market of international
commercial arbitrage (Dezaiay & Garth,
1993). But it is not only the legal or fiscal rules
which become competitive in this way, it is
also ail those which, to different degrees, con-
tribute to the elaboration (or redefinition) of
these regulatory frameworks, as well as to
their implementation (or circumvention). In
short, the entire mode of production and legit-
imation of professional know-how iiuds itself
implicated in this game of international compe-
tition (Dezalay & Trubek, 1993); in the world
of law just as on the consultancy market. In
fact, the different kinds of know-how are
tightly interwoven in the complex game
around these multiple regulatory devices, like
those which claim to guarantee free competi-
338 Y. DEWLAY
tion by forbidding dumping or monopoly prac-
tices, or more generally all those which work
towards enframing an activity of production or
exchange. The export - or import - of a
specific expertise is indissociable from the
export - or import - of the hierarchy of
know-ledge in which it is found to be
inscribed. Thus, to import the model of the
North American lawyer is implicitly to adopt a
social set-up which enables this professional
category to lay claim to the role of orchestra
conductor in muRidiscipRnary teams - as if
this leadership position was due to it by right.
Consequently, as a by-product, no know-how
can escape this international competition since
it affects not only its potential market, but also its
hierarchical position in the field of knowledge.
To complicate matters, since the different
national grids for sharing out roles on the
market for expertise rarely correspond with
each other, possibilities for poaching or occa-
sions for conflict multiply, as lawyers, accoun-
tants, tax experts and, more generally, all kinds
of consultants jostle each other at the bedside
of the enterprise. Thus, recent collapses of mul-
tinational companies have provided the oppor-
tunity for a confrontation between the British
and American models for taking responsibility
for companies in difficulty. The complication is
due to the fact that the former is inspired by
accountancy while the latter is highly legalistic.
Quite simply, the market is dominated in one
case by accountants and in the other by law-
yers. To be sure, whatever their family origin,
bankruptcy specialists pride themselves on
accumulating both orders of competence.
Nonetheless, however big the stakes, as in
the case of the great bankruptcies of tram+
national companies (Maxwell, Olympia and
York, for example) they have great dif%culty
in agreeing with each other, since each claims
to structure the whole apparatus of interven-
tion in their own way, the better to control
it. Recently this has reached the point of their
calling upon the good offices of a mediator, an
expert in interethnic conflicts.*
Happily, confrontations in the professional
* The case was that of Cyrus Vance who recently became famo~ concernitq the crisis in Yugoslavia.
EXPERTISE IN “PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY” 339
world remain largely symbolic. Perhaps this is
because the stakes in this rapidly expanding
market are mofe hlerarcbical than territorial.
The objective is not to eliminate the compet-
ing know-how, but to absorb it. As was said
expressively by one of the protagonists of the
offensive of Washington law firms in support of
recognition of multi-disciplinarity, the question
is “Who will be the leading cow?” (Dezalay,
1991). Competition between different,
national or international, fields of expertise
thus arises more from the “war of leaders
(chefs)” than from total war. Nevertheless, it
mobilizes a great many troops. In this race for
power, the victors are those who succeed in
building up their capital of transnational
renown by taking a leadership position in
highly visible, large international business.
From then on the concentration of resources
becomes a decisive factor. And the big British
practices enjoy a decisive advantage by virtue
of their size and age. So as not to see itself
relegated to the second rank, almost every-
where ln Europe the aristocracy of clerks is
thus led to devote itself in turn to a race for
expansion. So, rather than defending the tradi-
tional conception of a craft generalism, we see
certain leaders of professional bodies mobiliz-
ing their colleagues in the service of their per-
sonal ambitions, even if this means turning into
wage earners those who formerly were their
“fellows”. And transforming themselves at the
same time. By going from the status of ‘lprimus
fnter pares” to that of enterprise boss, these
clerks are, at the same time, obliged to adopt
an economic rationality in terms of profit that is
far removed from the ideal gentlemen’s profes-
sions. In this “palace revolution”, the modem-
ist fraction of the professional elite sacrifices on
the altar of the professional market a great deal
of the traditions and “habitus” constitutive of
the homogeneity and identity of national pro-
fessional fields. Clearly, it comes up against the
protests of the “guardians of the temple” who
are all the more vehement as their possibilities
of personal reconversion are limited. But the
position of these reformists is strong since,
rightly or wrongly, in an international confron-
tation between the multiple “tribes” of experts
given free rein by the dismemberment of
nation states, they seem to be “champions of
national know-how” to their peers.
“CLASSLESS CLASS” OR
INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF SOCIAL
HYPOCRISY?
To analyze these games of power and these
strategies for the reproduction of social capital
it is again necessary to have at one’s disposal
schemas of thought which do not conceal
them. Now we fmd here one of the principal
blindnesses of the scientific discourse [dfs-
tours savant] on the professions, which oper-
ates as if the ideal of collegiality and the cult of
knowledge automatically brackets off relations
of domination and social determinations. Perkin
explains the genesis of this blindness, while
partially succumbing to it himself. Professional
society, he tells us, is defined in opposition to
aristocracy; it is the outcome of the political
project of a middle class which seeks to abolish
privileges, but which also seeks to go beyond
class antagonisms. Neo-corporatism, merito-
cracy, the assumption of responsibility by the
State for fundamental needs like education and
health, and all those arrangements generated by
the professional society must, according to
their promoters, save capitalism from itself by
suppressing, if not classes themselves, then at
least the most violent manifestations of their
antagonisms. By putting itself forward as a
“classless class” (Perkin, 1989, p. 391) the
intellectual bourgeoisie legitimates itself as the
operator of mediation and social pacification.
Its emblematic figures, Iike that of the intellec-
tual or the expert, play a central role in this
political project: they put their competence in
the service of different social interests for
which they would be the spokesmen. But to
be credible to their constituents, these “social
engineers” must themselves go beyond their
class origins in order to become “free-floating
mental operators set apart from their social
origins” (ibid., p. 391).
340 Y. DEWLAY
That being the case, we can better under-
stand why scientific discourse [dfsco~rs
savant] on the professions remains almost
totally silent on these class phenomena. What
is at stake is the entire credibility of the enter-
prise of social mediation in which these
experts are involved. There is therefore a
very strong taboo surrounding the question of
social origins. But it is much more easily
respected if it is strongly interiorized by aca-
demics who are both products and producers
of the ideology of a meritocratic society. As
Domhoff (1983) observed, North American
sociologists are predisposed to blind them-
selves to the determinations of social origins
since they are actively involved in an under-
taking which aims to Emit their effects. More
precisely, they are involved in converting these
social privileges into hierarchies of skill. Even
if, in so doing, it means taking into this new
elite a small minority of exceptionally talented
individuals from more disadvantaged groups.
As Bourdieu (1989, p. 140ff.) has shown, the
educational reproduction of social stratifica-
tions arises from a statistical logic: it eliminates
some of the “less endowed” of the “heirs” the
better to ensure the reproduction of the estab
lishment as a whole, by giving it every appear-
ance of being a meritocracy. However, this
general rule, which ensures a correspondence
between social hierarchies and educational
hierarchies, must not be seen as an inviolable
achievement. Teachers labour to make educa-
tional training and selection more rigorous, and
they can count on the political support of the
entire educated band of the middle class con-
cerned with developing its capital of skill in the
face of possessors of an economic or relational
capital. Thus, when the spokesperson of the
professional world denies the weight of social
determinations, as if meritocracy had achieved
a definitive triumph, to a great extent their aim
rises from the “self-fuUillmg prophecy”. By
concealing them, they tend in fact to disqualify
the privileges of birth as outmoded archaisms.
Perkin, no more than others, does not escape
these blinding effects linked to his academic
condition: he identities himself with a meritoc-
racy the advances of which he overestimates
because he considers them to be as legitimate
as they are ineluctable. Even if he sometimes
distances himself condescendingly from those
“modem samurai” who would be “lone intel-
lectual(s) raised above the crowd by their
talent” (Perkin, 1989, p. 391) he readily
admits that he has always thought that the
“professional middle class” constituted a
“whole ready-made class of potential cranks”
who are defined as individuals prepared to
espouse the interests of a class other than their
own (ibid., p. 438). Therefore he hardly chal-
lenges this idealized representation of a
“classless class” devoting itself to limiting the
privileges of capital or birth in order to reduce
social antagonisms. Certainly, he recognizes
that, after the great leap forward of social uni-
formization resulting from the war effort and
subsequent reconstruction, the institutionaliza-
tion of social compromise has been very diffi-
cult. But, according to him, this semi-failure
should be imputed just as much to the persis-
tance of “class archaisms” and the pressures of
international competition as to the arrogance
of these high priests of social pacification or
their internal disputes.
By taking up again for his own purposes this
myth of the professional, who escapes the
determinations of his social origins thanks to
this knowledge, Perkin not only helps to rein-
force a mystification which is fundamental to
the symbolic power of these experts, he also
prevents himself from analyzing how relations
of domination are reproduced at the very heart
of a professional society. For this reason, it is
impossible for him to explain the paradox of a
professional society which is tom apart even
though it is at its peak. He is content with a
description which is above all a product of
denunciation. The historian then gives way
before the polemicist. Just as he is verbose
when it is a question of describing the setting
up of a welfare state which develops in total
symbiosis with the ideals of the professional
society, so he is reticent when it is a question
of explaining the social and professional bases
on which the neo-liberal movement is con-
EXPERTISE IN “PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY” 341
strutted. And no doubt he is being somewhat
hasty in his task when he limits himself to cit-
ing Reich, for whom “paper entrepreneurial-
ism is the bastard child of scientijk
management” (ibid., p. 503).
Instead of a reminder of Hayek’s theses and a
somewhat facile denunciation of Thatcher&e
doctrines and the cupidity of people like
Boesky or Saunders, one would have liked to
know the path which led from these theories
to these practices. In the same way, by what
sort of “miracle” have these generations of
labour relations organizers, some of whom
aspired to being a sort of “priesthood in indus
try” (p. 304) given birth to these “modem
missionaries of free exchange”, the yuppies
of law and finance? What has changed in the
structure of the enterprise to explain this
transition from one type of specialist to
another? On all these points, alas, the analysis
is somewhat short. This threatens to weaken
considerably the central thesis of a profes-
sional society which would brutally tear itself
apart, even though it is at its peak and nothing,
or almost nothing, in his analysis leads us to
expect this break up. The existence of a back-
lash against the social state can hardly be
denied. But to understand the success of this
movement it would be necessary first of all to
distance oneself from the idealized representa-
tion of a professional society having gone
beyond its class origins the better to devote
itself to the great work of social pacification.
That would have enabled him to break with the
myth of a professional society as socially homo-
geneous as it is monolithic in its political
project.
On the contrary, as the works of Pierre Bour-
dieu have shown, it is the relative diversity of
social origins represented in the professions
which makes it possible for symbolic fields
like law or the university to claim to represent
the diversity of positions and social strategies.
Moreover, it is the play of internal conflicts
between individuals occupying different posi-
tions in the field which makes possible a per-
manent adjustment of the fields political
positions to the transformation of relations of
forces in the social field. The latter develop
with greater ease if these professionals occupy
positions in the middle which enable them to
play different roles successively or, indeed,
simultaneously. These professionals are more
than just “social cranks”, above all they are
professionals of the double game. Lawyers pro-
vide the best example of these professionals
whose “institutional schizophrenia” (Gordon,
1984) makes them perfect “guardians of collec-
tive hypocrisy” (Bourdieu, 1991). Their effec-
tiveness as mediators is due precisely to the
fact that in their practice they succeed in pro
ducing a coexistence between the ideology of
public service and the logic of profit. To para-
phrase Weber, these clerks are above all
“merchants and social peace”. In line with
the adage “doing well by doing good”, they
produce profits by doing good: their market
value is a direct function of the capital of
civic virtue and honorability that they have
accumulated and from which they enable
their clients to profit. Playing on two tables
in no way prevents them, depending on the
political conjuncture or their own strategies,
from bringing to the fore now one and now
the other of these two complementary facets
of their talent.
Thus, the ideological fracture at the heart of
the professional society that Perkin presents as
a new phenomenon is doubtless only an episo-
dic manifestation of this structural duality of
the field of experts serving power. Rather
than a fundamental ideological turnaround, it
is doubtless only a matter of a readjustment
of the themes of the dominant discourse in
order to bring them more into line with a dis
placement of relations of force taking place
simultaneously in the economic and profes-
sional fields. In this way both are brought
closer together. We have shown already how
international competition obliges the heirs of
the noblesse de robe gradually to convert
themselves into bosses of service enterprises
who are all the more eager to promote the
merits of economic rationality as they are
obliged to put it into practice in their profes-
sional life. Equally, it could be shown how
342 Y. DEWLAY
transformations of the political field have
entailed the reconversion of hiers of the lndus
vial and financial bourgeoisie into profes-
sionals of management, at the same time
introducing the logic of capital into the scien-
tific field [champ savant] and therefore, a
forti ort, into the professional field.
Paradoxically, it is perhaps the relative suc-
cess of those promoting a more meritocratic
logic which has provided the basis for those
transformations which result in the ideal of
social justice they claim to embody now being
challenged. In fact, as Bourdieu has shown, the
increasingly universal recognition of educa-
tional qualifications has obliged the families of
the industrial or financial bourgeoisie to seek in
turn this type of scientific legitimacy [GgW
mfte’ suvunte] that previously they had rather
neglected. Hence an increased competition
which is combined with strivings from autono-
mlzation by producers of the scientific field
[chump savant] so as to intensify educational
competition. These pressures have encouraged
the development of what are called “sheltered
schools” [&oZes refuges]. Business or manage-
ment schools, which have proliferated over the
last 20 years, are the prime example of these
institutions: by according academic status to
qualifications transmitted essentially by the
social milieu, they provide these familial strate-
gies with the means to escape a verdict which
is too narrowly educational (Bourdleu, 1989, p.
328). Through them, the business bourgeoisie
enters foursquare In the field of knowledge
and expertise. In so doing it Introduces its eco-
nomic rationality into the universe of clerks
which, with greater or lesser success, pre-
viously had tried to preserve their relative
autonomy with regard to those possessing
economic power.
It might be objected that this strategy of
reconversion is explained by the existence of
an educational system, as imbued with its tradl-
tions as it is strongly imbricated ln the State,
which has produced those French pecullarltles
- the intellectuals (Charle, 1990), the
“grundes t%oZes” or the “nobl esse &Et&‘.
However, this is far from being an isolated
example. It has been observed already by Balt-
zell(l964) that the hiers of the robber barons
became professionals by going on to acquire
diplomas - and legitimacy - ln colleges
richly endowed by their fathers. The academic
qualification is a privileged way of galnlng
access to social respectability. It ls also one of
the most effective ways of sheltering the family
capital from economic or political hazards,’ by
securing for it the durability and universality of
a professional know-how. It is therefore not by
chance that, owing to the crisis and the lnter-
nationalization of economies, there is an accel-
eration of those strategies of conversion. In a
context in which family enterprises often have
no alternative to bankruptcy except fusion ln a
big group, possession of a qualification makes it
easier for the heirs to capitalize their relations
or their experience as entrepreneurs. It faclli-
tates their redeployment as a director of one of
the subsidiaries of the conglomerate which
absorbs their patrimony. The success of some
in this new career is such that they benefit
from a double, patrlomonlal and academic,
legitimacy. Moreover, the market value of the
latter increases greatly in a period of restructur-
ing and internationalization. By destroylng the
local lndustrlal fabric, the crisis accordingly
reduces the extent and importance of the net-
work of relations that constituted a good part
of the social capital of these family entrepre-
neurs. Inversely, the complexity and fluidity
of a global market requires precisely the formal
type of rationality and would-be universally
valld skills that the educational system excels
at producing. An international market, ln
which partners are often as socially distant
from each other as they are geographically,
could not function like those closed and stable
mllieux ruled by the adage “my word is my
bond”. The handshake turns out to be quite
insufiicient for llmlting the risks implied by
this new type of transaction, and from now on
commercial partners prefer extremely detailed
contracts which demand armies of lawyers and
accountants. To lay claim to the role of broker
in the economic field one must now have at
one’s disposal a solid baggage of expertise.
EXPERTISE IN “PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY” 343
acceleration of international economic restruc-
turing, the business bourgeoisie rediscovers
the advantages of academic qualifications
which can easily be exported and capitalized.
At once, it rejoins the ranks of a “professional
society” which, in part, was defined outside of,
if not against, it. This, it seems to us, is what
explains the paradox, noted by Perkin, of a
professional society whose triumph just pre-
cedes its break-up and a radical change of
view in relation to the ideals of its founding
fathers. The expansion of professional know-
how makes it henceforth one of the privileged
sites of the reproduction of social capital. From
now on the heirs of the business bourgeoisie
invest massively in the field of expertise and
learning; in virtue of this, the latter increas-
ingly tends to merge with the sites and institu-
tions where economic power is - legitimately
-
exercised. This, perhaps, is the moment for
the sociology of the professions to abandon its
“provincialism” - and its illusions - so as to
come to terms with itself as one of the compo-
nents of a sociology of the reproduction of
relations of power in the field of knowledge
and expertise.
Translated by Graham Burchell.
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