Career and Profession As Subversive Concepts at Mid-20th Century

Mid-twentieth century sociologists showed great ingenuity applying the hegemonic concepts of career and profession to subvert commonplace ideas of success and progress. These concepts of career and profession in overlapping but different ways formed part of a cluster of modernising narratives distinguishing ‘advanced’ western nations from underdeveloped nations; they also distinguishing middle-upper sections of modern technological societies from uneducated parts of the labour market. These ostensibly descriptive uses of the concepts of career and profession were highly normative in two senses. First, they embedded a prescriptive ideal about what individuals should do or what constituted a worthy occupational focus. Second, such aspirations embraced by middle-class individuals was naturalised as the desirable modern route to success and fulfilment. Pioneering work by scholars such as Goffman and Becker re-purposed the notion of career as a tool to subvert everyday hegemonic assumptions, delineating instead trajectories of inequality. Similarly, Freidson and Johnson’s re-framed professional benefit and ‘goodness’ as problematic against claims to naturalised legitimacy. The passage of time makes it possible to miss the radical nature of their critiques, intellectual work of great difficulty and adroitness against the grain of both civil society and prevailing academic views.