Professionalization: Its Functions and Dysfunctions for the Life Insurance Occupation

T HE rising tide of professionalization is one of the most striking characteristics of contemporary occupational organization.' Associated with is it increasingly specialized knowledge and service as well as elevated prestige for professionals and would-be professionals. The trend toward an ever expanding number of professions continues almost unabated as numerous occupational groupings among white collar workers and specialists seek professional status. Indeed, in modern society the traditional distinctions between professions and nonprofessions have become quite tenuous. There is a tendency for all occupations that require advanced education, training, or technical skill to put forth claims to professional status.2 It has also become common practice to seek legal certification and its accompanying monopolistic advantages.' An evaluation of the situation leads one readily to the conclusion that, while professions are growing quantitatively, their qualitatively distinct characteristics have become diluted and their influence on occupational behavior precarious. It has in fact been asserted by one authority that the distinction between occupations and professions is invidious.4 Despite the impressive increase in the number of occupations that are called professions by their practitioners, there are numerous difficulties encountered by an occupation that seeks to achieve professional status and recognition. Professionalization can hardly be achieved through study of lists of characteristics of professions5 and the development of a program which seeks to attain these characteristics as though they were "steps" in the achievement of professional status. It is the purpose of this paper to bring into view some of the dynamics of the difficult professionalization process as revealed by an investigation of life insurance men.6 This study calls to attention the conflict of two major goals of the occupation: to promote professionalization, and to extend life insurance protection to all socio-economic groups in the population. For the occupation the trend toward professionalization is functional7 in that it heightens occupational status; however, it is dysfunctional for both the occupation and society *Read before the twenty-second annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, April 18, 1959. 1 For studies of the growth, development, and status of the professions, see A. M. Carr-Saunders and P. A. Wilson, The Professions (London: Oxford University Press, 1933); Roy Lewis and Angus Maude, Professional People (London: Phoenix House, Ltd., 1952); and Talcott Parsons, "The Professions and Social Structure," Social Forces, 17 (May 1939), pp. 457-467. 2 A. M. Carr-Saunders, "Metropolitan Conditions and Traditional Professional Relationships," in Robert Moore Fisher (ed.), The Metropolis in Modern Life (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1955), pp. 280281. 3 An impressive and revealing discussion of occupational licensing and its consequences is found in Walter Gellhorn, Individual Freedom and Governmental Restraints, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), chap. 3. 4Donald Young, "Universities and Cooperation Among Metropolitan Professions," in Fisher, op. cit., p. 290. 5Listings of the characteristics of the professions are found in Edward Gross, "Some Suggestions for the Legitimation of Industrial Studies in Sociology," Social Forces, 33 (March 1955), pp. 234-235; Myron Lieberman, Education as a Profession (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1956), pp. 2-6; and Lewis and Maude, op. cit., pp. 55-56. 6 See M. Lee Taylor, The Life Insurance Man: A Sociological Analysis of the Occupation (unpublished Doctor's dissertation, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 1958). 7For a discussion of the concepts of functionalism, see Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Struclure (rev. and enl. ed.; Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 19-84.