Sociological Words

A good lesson for me yesterday. I was looking at an exam paper. Explain the meaning, said the questions, of the terms ‘professional’ and ‘status’. So, being a typical teacher parent, I tried them out on my 15 year old son. Intriguing answers…

Status, according to Chris, is ‘what you’re doing at the time’. Mmm, not difficult to see where that one came from. Thanks Facebook.

Professional, according to Chris is ‘getting paid for what you do.’ Like a football player, he added, helpfully.

Interesting. For sociologists, status refers to position in a hierarchy - does one have high or low status? Who has the higher status in our society, old or young? Male or Female? Black or White?

Professional - well, that term is used very loosely these days - in my opinion. Yes, in everyday language - ‘be professional’ means doing the job properly, taking a pride in your work, and it implies that it is your full-time occupation, not just something you dabble in now and then. And yes, being paid is another meaning - but then lots of people get paid. Are they all professional too?

But in sociology, ‘professional’ has a much more narrow meaning. My favourite definition comes from the German C19 (and early C20) sociologist Max Weber. He said that a profession is a group which controls entry into its own ranks - and that means it can to a considerable degree, ensure its own pay rates are kept high. So the classic examples of a profession defined like this would be lawyers or doctors. For lawyers (barristers), in the UK, the Inns of Court set the qualifications required to be a barrister. In medicine it is the Royal Colleges which determine how many applicants will be admitted each year.

By this definition, teachers are certainly not a profession. The Government decides how many teachers it needs and it sets the entry qualifications. There are also teachers in private schools; they have different conditions and rules. The private schools can employ who they like to teach; while many teachers will have teaching qualifications, they aren’t necessary. But the teachers are still not professional in Weber’s terms, since they are merely employees - they don’t set their own conditions and qualifications for entry to the profession. That is decided by the Headteachers in private schools, who make their own decisions about who to employ and how many staff they need.

So do these words and different definitions matter?

Yes. In sociology, ordinary words can be used in a different way to the way they are used in everyday life. When the different meanings are useful, its because they explain something, or they are doing some explanatory work for us - as I think they do in both the examples above. The sociological definition of profession for example, tells us about power. The definition of status tells us about social hierarchies.

So be careful to check up the meaning of words in sociology, even if you think you know what they mean - the meanings can change.