Decline, Crisis or Change? Professional Status and Knowledge Authority Among Danish Doctors and Teachers

A common way to address the poor outcomes of public policy, for instance in areas like health care and education, is to blame policy failures on the loss of respect for professional authorities. No one today respects a primary school teacher as they used to do fifty or sixty years ago, and patients now focus on their own rights and google searches rather than the doctor’s orders. If not more, these are at least common narratives in public debates about professionals and why the decline – or even crisis - of professional authority is at the root of present problems.

This paper aims to go beyond the narratives and investigate decline, change and restructuring of professional status and knowledge authority since 1950. Taking the Danish primary school teachers and medical doctors as cases, we explore how the status of professional groups are changing (or not) over a sixty year time span. More precisely, we explore both the development of professional status in a general sense of a societal status hierarchy, and in a more narrow sense, understood as the professional authority vis-à-vis other professional groups, clients and the state.

While notoriously difficult to measure, not least going back in time, we hope to be able to assess possible changes through a combination of various data sources. Besides socioeconomic data about salaries and education, we mainly analyze status and authority through a comparison of professional selfperceptions and narratives as presented in magazines distributed within the professions.