Status and Status Strain in the Professions

Abstract

Professionals and nonprofessionals assign different status to the subspecialities of the various professions. This follows from their different bases for prestige assignment. Intraprofessional status rests on the exclusion of nonprofessional issues or of professional issues irrelevant in a particular case. Public status for professionals rests on effective contact with disorder or nonorder. In the pursuit of intraprofessional status, professions and professionals thus tend to withdraw from precisely those problems for which the public gives them status. This phenomenon of professional regression partly accounts for many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of professional life, such as the prominence of inappropriate training, the rapid dispersal of esoteric professional knowledge to the public, and the lack of systematic approaches to such important problems as death.