The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Institutions) by Andrew Abbott

The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Institutions) by Andrew Abbott

Author:Andrew Abbott
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780226000695
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: 1988-08-15T05:00:00+00:00


The Quantitative Task Area

Unlike the qualitative area, the quantitive information area has a complex and contested history. Accountants have warred with engineers, statisticians with economists, operations researchers with cost accountants. Here the consequences of disturbances ramify so rapidly that I shall be able only to outline their beginnings. But again the system model leads us to the right questions: What were the external disturbances and their effects on professional demand and performance? What internal changes in knowledge and structure changed competitive positions? How did internal differentiation interact with system structure to create temporary stabilities?

Although organizational demand built the quantitative information professions of the nineteenth century, these professions did not emerge, as librarians did, through the creation or transformation of jobs in organizations. In Britain, to be sure, accountants emerged through the transformation of receivership into a full-time occupation. But from their beginnings in the last years of the nineteenth century, the American accountants did less bankruptcy and more public accounting.23 Partly this reflected the colonial nature of American accounting, founded by expatriate Britons imbued with the idea of full-time professional practice. But the difference also reflected the structure of American demand, particularly for public accounting. The dispersion of American society and capital weakened personal and familistic capital mobilization, forcing an early reliance on public stock and investment. American stockholders and financiers, often far from the objects of their investment, had an enormous need for reliable information on stock companies, a need underscored by the scandals of the robber baron era. By the last years of the century, the government also needed accounting services. Not only did its desire to regularize transportation rates require industry use of standardized accounting, the government itself expected to apply those practices. The late nineteenth century thus saw several constituencies for accurate public accounting. While there was continuity between bookkeeping and accounting, and while accountants’ first major business was uncovering fraud and obscurantism, a large new jurisdiction over the attestation of capital was open to the accountants as soon as they could establish their legitimacy.24

If the rise of large corporations and the national capital market that fed them helped create the American accounting profession, the rise of interventionist governments built the work of statistics.25 Statistics, in its then general sense of quantitative social information used by governments, had a long history in America and elsewhere. The more governments intervened, the more they wanted to know about public health, industry, commerce, immigration, and so on. The American Statistical Association, an old (1839) and active body, drew together members of various professions and organizations interested in gathering such figures. Rather like the librarians, these “statisticians” were more interested in compiling numbers than in analyzing them. But again as with the librarians, that stance reflected lack of technique as much as lack of desire. It is striking, however, that statistics did not coalesce as a professional group until the intellectual revolution of inferential statistics. Although one might have expected a process of enclosure here, statistical workers remained identified with their original professions—the great Edward Jarvis being an excellent example.



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