Professional Ethics

Professional Ethics
Author(s): Andrew Abbott

Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 88, No. 5 (Mar., 1983), pp. 855-885
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Professional Ethics'
Andrew Abbott
Rutgers University
Through comparative analysis, this paper establishes five basic prop-

erties of professional ethics codes: universal distribution, correlation
with intraprofessional status, enforcement dependent on visibility,
individualism, and emphasis on colleague obligations. After discuss-
ing traditional explanations of these properties from the functionalist
and monopolist perspectives, the paper adds a third perspective, re-
lating ethics directly to intra- and extraprofessional status. A final
section analyzing developments in professional ethics in America
since 1900 specifies the interplay of the three processes hypothesized
in the competing perspectives.
The sociological literature has examined two levels of societal demands

on the professions. Durkheim ([ 1902 ] 1964), Marshall (1965), and others
have focused on the professions' corporate obligations for service to
society. Thus, Marshall (p. 174) discusses the British Medical Associa-
tion's goals of providing "positive health and the prevention of disease."
Auerbach (1976, p. 13), from an opposite ideological perspective, speaks
of the "ominous gap between the services dispensed by the legal profession
and equal justice." It is thus not merely a quirk of functionalism to speak
of the obligations of medicine to provide health, of law to provide justice,
of clergy to provide salvation. Even within highly individualistic Anglo-
American social theory, it is common practice to consider this level of
professional obligation. Empirical analyses of such corporate service
1 This paper grew out of a presentation at the Hastings Center, Hastings-on-Hudson,

N.Y. Although the fundamental objections of the center staff to the assumptions of
this work remain unanswered, their specific criticisms have provoked useful improve-
ments. I must thank Harry Bredemeier, Robert Gutman, Michael Powell, Paul Cleary,
and Jeffrey Slovak for detailed and helpful comments on later drafts. Anthony Grafton
and Anthony La Vopa gave useful advice on historical sources. I must also thank
David Klassen, custodian of the National Association of Social Workers papers and
director of the Social Welfare History Archives Center at the University of Minne-
sota, through whose kind permission the records of the association are used here. I
regret that the excellent report of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science Professional Ethics Project (Chalk, Frankel, and Chafer 1980) did not come
to my attention until after the present paper was in final form. While nothing in it
leads me to question my argument, it does offer information that might have extended
that argument, information the interested reader will wish to pursue. Requests for re-
prints should be sent to Andrew Abbott, Department of Sociology, Rutgers University,
New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903.
?;/ 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

0002-9602/83/8805-0002$01.50
AJS Volume 88 Number 5 855
American Journal of Sociology
obligations have been common since the 1920s. The reports of the Pitts-
burgh Survey (Eastman 1910) and the Committee on the Costs of Medi-
cal Care (1929-33) are good examples. Such reports usually study issues
of distribution, cost, and quality. They have generally viewed corporate
professional service as an aggregate of individual instances. The abstract
cultural imperative is operationalized, at least in American studies, as a
sum of professionally defined particulars.
Other sociologists, Parsons (1951, 1952) for example, have focused
their examinations of the obligations of professions more on the individual
professional/client relationship. In the Parsonian analysis the asymmetry
of expertise in that relationship demands a special type of social control
within the professional role, an internalized, normative control embodied
outwardly in canons of professional ethics. Although the assumption that
norms coincide with written ethics requires proof, the distinction itself
is important. Rules governing the practitioner/client relationship may be
formal, written rules or merely normative routines and controls of every-
day professional life. A similar distinction holds for rules governing rela-
tions between colleagues. It does not hold for corporate obligations, which
are generally unwritten cultural assumptions, even though they may
appear in formal ethics codes.
In a theoretical sense, then, professions have two levels of obligations,
corporate and individual. The latter level is governed by both formal and
informal rules. In this paper I shall analyze one of the major ways in
which the professions themselves have concretized these obligations-the
phenomenon of professional ethics. I shall consider the two major theories
used to account for patterns of professional ethics and shall raise a third,
complementary theory of my own. Finally, I shall discuss the conditions
determining the interplay of the three.2
Most of the data are primary and secondary materials dealing with
ethics codes. These codes usually include references to corporate obliga-
tions as well as prescriptions for relationships to colleagues and clients.
They thus cover all levels of professional controls except for informal
controls. In part my reasons for this focus are practical. In order to
make the analysis general, I have drawn on a wide variety of histor-
ical and contemporary examples, and, for obvious reasons, data on formal
codes and their enforcement are more common than data on informal
controls. Yet this constraint also reflects my theoretical interest. Ethics
codes are the most concrete cultural form in which professions acknowl-
edge their societal obligations. Furthermore, much recent literature (e.g.,
2 In this paper the word "profession" refers to an exclusive occupational group pos-
sessing a specialized skill that is based in some way on esoteric knowledge. There is
much to lose and little to gain by insisting on a precise definition. It is important to
realize that I am not defining professions in terms of the presence or absence of ethics
codes.
856
Professional Ethics
Carlin 1966; Freidson 1975) has empirically questioned the culturally

accepted connection of professional ethics to the fulfillment of professional
obligations and has found that informal or situational rules are in fact
the more important mechanisms of social control. It is therefore impor-
tant to consider professional ethics-that is, formal codes and their
enforcement-as an independent phenomenon, viewing informal controls
and rules as a context and an alternative.3
I. PATTERNS OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
From the available evidence one can discern five basic properties of
professional ethics. First, nearly all professions have some kind of formal
ethical code. In the American professions these have usually been written
codes (for collections, see Heermance 1924; Landis 1927; National
Education Association 1931; Hill 1976). Millerson (1964) notes a
tendency to unwritten, but equally formal, codes in British professions.
A number of British professions have formal disciplinary procedures
without codes, for example, certified accountants. In the professions of
France and Germany under the Old Regime such codes were supervised
directly by various governmental authorities (Dorwart 1953; Gelfand
1978; Bruford 1965). Professions are not the only corporate bodies to
possess ethical codes, however. That codes regulated all the corps d'arts
et me'tiers in prerevolutionary France is well known (Coornaert 1968;
Mousnier 1979). Recent American business provides another example
(Towle 1964). Service clubs like Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions have led
recurrent attempts to spread ethics in business (Gundaker 1922;
Ferguson 1937). Thus the universal distribution of ethics codes in the
professions must be seen in two contexts. On the one hand, codes may
be continuous with other forms of formal control. On the other, codes
are not the sole property of the traditional liberal professions but can
be found in numerous other groups.4
3 Retrospective studies of informal controls are only now beginning to appear. For
the current period there is a vast general literature on professional ethics and a more
manageable one dealing with the mechanics of formal codes and their enforcement
(see Gothie 1973). The major surveys of formal codes are in Carr-Saunders and Wil-
son (1933) and Millerson (1964). Studies of informal controls in medicine are fairly
common (e.g., Freidson 1975; Bosk 1979), but such studies are less usual in other
professions (but see Carlin 1966). Throughout the paper I shall distinguish between
informal enforcement (of formal ethical rules) and informal controls-the latter being
the much more inclusive category of all informal norms, situational values, and simi-
lar means of social control.
4 As early as 1911 American realtors created a formal code, but the twenties brought
the carbonated beverage bottlers, peanut growers, and other similar groups into the
ethical field. Although most of these groups are not usually considered professions,
it is important that they be included in this analysis. Many of them have profes-
857
Second, both belief in and compliance with formal ethical codes seem
to be related positively to intraprofessional status.5 Carlin's elegant
study (1966) of this phenomenon among New York lawyers attributed
it to situational rather than normative factors, as did Handler's (1967)
replication in Prairie City. Laumann and Heinz (1977), however, found
it as a normative pattern in their lawyer panel. Baumhart (1968) gave
a situational account for similar results among business managers. In
many professions the relation has held because only practitioners of
high intraprofessional status are members of professional organizations
and thereby subject to professional ethical jurisdiction. (See, e.g.,
Gelfand [19781; Rothstein [1969]; and Landis [1927], on 18th-century
French surgeons, 20th-century American engineers, and early 20th-
century American accountants and architects, respectively.) This has
been especially true in American business, where it is common for the
"respectable" members of an industry to create and enforce ethics
codes for their potential business value (see Hill 1976 and esp. Offen 1976) ."
The "good ethics is good business" theory is also relevant to solo pro-
fessionals (Lochner 1975).
An implied corollary of this second property is that large portions
sional pretensions. Many of them employ formal ethics procedures modeled on those
of the traditional professions. A sociological theory of these phenomena, then, has to
consider the evidence available in business ethics. Durkheim (1958) followed such an
approach (professional ethics was the collective conscience of the professional group,
the latter term designating any occupation) but regarded business as far less ethical
(in turn-of-the-century France) than it seems to have been in America in the twen-
ties. He took the success of ethics in the professions proper for granted, a position
seriously disputed by evidence presented here. An interesting interpretation of Amer-
ican business ethics is that of Engelbourg (1980).
5 Some definitions are necessary here. By status I mean a property of an individual

or role that determines the deference or honor due it in interaction (see Shils [1968]
for an extended discussion). Status in this definition is fundamentally cultural. Unlike
such other dimensions of stratification as income and, to some extent, power and edu-
cation, it cannot be measured outside the eyes of the beholders. By intraprofessional
status I mean the status of an individual professional or professional subgroup in the
eyes of other members of the same profession. By interprofessional status I mean the
status of one profession in the eyes of others. By extraprofessional status I mean the
status of particular professions in the eyes of the general public. I assume loosely uni-
dimensional status hierarchies in intra- and extraprofessional status. Evidence on
intraprofessional status is reviewed in Abbott (1981). Positive evidence for unidimen-
sionality in extraprofessional status is reviewed by Treiman (1977). A strong critique
of Treiman's approach may be found in the work of Coxon and Jones (1978, 1979a,
1979b), who argue for a more polymorphous view of extraprofessional status as ne-
gotiated in interaction, a position also taken by Haug (1976).
6 One obvious way of accounting for this relationship would be a drift hypothesis,
in which individuals become of low status because they are unethical. All the avail-
able data argue strongly against this position by showing that the relation of ethics
to status is one of positions rather than of individuals. Laumann and Heinz's data
(1977) are particularly important for this point.
858
Professional Ethics
of the service areas claimed as professional jurisdiction are in fact served

by practitioners who are seen by their colleagues of higher intraprofes-
sional status as unethical or at least as ethically questionable. Carlin's
(1966) strong results on this issue in American law are given historical
depth by Auerbach (1976). Gelfand (1978) and Ramsey (1977) find
the same phenomenon in 18th-century French medicine, as do La Vopa
(1979) among 19th-century German schoolteachers, Gardiner (1979)
among 19th-century American architects, and Peterson (1978) among
19th-century English physicians. The susceptibility of these less for-
mally ethical groups to informal ethical enforcement is questionable.
Public policy forced Gelfand's 18th-century French surgeons to endure
the charlatans in silence, while Peterson's Victorian general practitioners
overcame "unethical specialism" by rapidly evolving their own specialty
institutions. Effective competition has similarly been the normal strategy
of "ethical" businesses against tinethical competition, at least in the
United States where federal statutes and regulations forbid direct
sanctions (see the sources in Hill [1976]). Perhaps the most character-
istic response to this problem has been the attempt to extend member-
ship and with it the possibility of formal controls via certification or
code adherence (see, e.g., La Vopa 1979). Alternatively, the professions
have sought full state monopoly as a more effective means of policing
the unethical (e.g., American medicine and law, see Konold 1962;
Berlant 1975; Markowitz and Rosner 1973; McKean 1963).
A third property concerns the enforcement of formal ethics. A sizable
body of evidence indicates that formal prosecution under professional
ethics rules is a function largely of the public visibility of the offense.
No other hypothesis has been advanced to account for the vast difference
between the high rates of violation and the low rates of prosecution
found by Carlin (1966), Arthurs (1970), Landis (1927), and Millerson
(1964) in a wide variety of professions. These authors present some
positive evidence for the visibility theory, emphasizing the tendency
7 In interpreting the results of recent historical studies of the professions (e.g., Gel-
fand 1978; Ramsey 1977; La Vopa 1979) I have followed the practice of the profes-
sionals discussed in these studies in regarding lack of official credentials (educational
or otherwise) as evidence of questionable professional ethics in the eyes of profes-
sional leaders. To the 18th-century surgical lieutenant, practicing without certification
was unethical. Where professionals themselves have separated ethics and certification,
I have done so as well. For that reason I have not included modern American medi-
cine here, although the American medical establishment's views of the foreign medical
graduates who provide a large fraction of hospital care in the United States has at
times verged on criticizing ethics as well as competence. Thus, it has sometimes
been implied that foreign medical graduates migrated to states with easy licensing
examinations in the years before the Federal Licensing Examination. (For discussions,
see Margulies and Bloch 1969; Dublin 1972; Goldblatt et al. 1975; Stevens, Goodman,
and Mick 1978.)
859
to punish breaches of professional/client obligations more severely than

intraprofessional violations.8
An alternative interpretation would be that the correlation of prose-
cution with visibility reflects the effect of informal enforcement on the
less visible ethical offenses. Yet evidence for this is mixed. Freidson
(1970, 1975) has argued that informal controls in general are rather weak
in 20th-century American medicine. Hall (1948, 1949) indicates that repu-
tation for personal character, established through patron relationships
in a medical career, substitutes for more specific informal enforcement.
Bosk (1979), however, has argued for the priority of ethical over tech-
nical issues in surgical training.. Similarly, Carlin's (1966) data on the
ethical influence of colleagues reflect serious informal enforcement, as
does Bensman's (1967) account of ethics in advertising. In all these
cases, however, informal enforcement is largely a by-product of informal
controls that are directed at maintaining everyday professional routines.
A fourth basic property of professional ethics is its application to
individual professionals and individual occasions of professional be-
havior. Both Millerson's (1964) and Landis's (1927) lists of injunctions
in professional codes show that professional codes do not regulate aggre-
gate professional performance or conduct-total provision or costs of
service, total quality of results, and the like-even though these have
long been measurable phenomena and matters for occasional public
outcry.9 Professional ethics codes deal with individuals and individual
behaviors. This individualism divides the Anglo-American professions
and their recent Continental imitators from the German and French profes-
sions of the Old Regime. The professions of France before 1789 derived
their ethical rules from formal corporate obligations imposed on them
by central authorities (Coornaert 1968; Mousnier 1979). Thus, respon-
sibility for public health flowed directly through official hierarchies to
8 Arthurs (1970) provides a particularly clear finding that the ethical cases pursued
most fully are those involving criminal violations. In conversation, Michael Powell
has suggested that this pattern of higher rates of violation than of enforcement re-
flects a desire of the professions to maintain both the appearance of vigilance and the
public impression of the universality of ethical professional behavior. Ethics boards
need enough cases to look active but not enough to make the profession look bad.
Actually the disparity between violation and prosecution is a familiar one and may
not require so specific an explanation. Similar relations are of long duration in other
formal control systems, e.g., in the criminal courts (Heumann 1975).
9 A good example of an attempt to measure the total provision of service by a pro-

fession is the report series of the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care (1929-33).
The committee aimed at a "definitive evaluation of the organization and the avail-
ability to the public of scientific medicine" (Stevens 1971, p. 170). Among its 26 stud-
ies were 17 reports on facilities and services, covering industrial companies, military
posts, regions, counties, and cities. At least four studies focused on issues of cost and
distribution, looking at variation by both geographic and socioeconomic location.
There were also studies of morbidity and of health professionals.
860
Professional Ethics
the local surgical community (Gelfand 1978). Similar ties of authority

connected the Geheimer Justizrat with the Collegium Medicum in Prussia.
Under the Prussian system all state professions were subject to regulation
by a centralized staff organization (the Fiskale and his subordinates; see
Dorwart [1953]). Clearly, direct application of aggregate types of control
to professional groups, while unusual, is not impossible. However, the
modern French and German professions have partly escaped it (Ruesche-
meyer 1973; Shinn 1978), and individualistic ethics has become the general
rule.10
This individualism has a number of implications and corollaries. Where
individualism has reigned, professionals whose practice is directly involved
with corporate professional obligations are somewhat intraprofessionally
deprecated, although theoretical writing on these corporate problems is
not necessarily disparaged. Thus, public health within American medicine
(Coker et al. 1966) and community mental health within American
psychiatry (Henry, Sims, and Spray 1973) are of low intraprofessional
status. Indeed, what seem now to be obvious corporate obligations have
been opposed, occasionally, on ethical grounds. For example, reporting
of communicable diseases was opposed on grounds of confidentiality by
some American physicians of the last century (Konold 1962; Rosenkrantz
1974). This deprecation has not obtained where professionals have de-
rived corporate authority directly from the state, state-conferred public
health responsibility being one of the cultural foundations of surgeons'
prestige in prerevolutionary France, for example. Another corollary of
ethical individualism is the one-case-at-a-time approach to control and
discipline. Since the violation of ethical rules occurs only by individual
instances of offense rather than by group failure on some aggregate
measure, formal professional control is an intermittent matter of cases
and rulings, rather than of continuous measurement and surveillance.
Again the pattern was quite different under the bureaucratic professional-
ism of the Old Regime where centralized authorities frequently reformed
the professions to remedy defects uncovered by continuous supervision
10 One tradition in the study of the professions .views their individualism partly as an
artifact of their 19th-century origins (see, e.g., Ben-David 1963; Bledstein 1976).
While this argument has obvious strengths, it has a number of less apparent, but no
less important, weaknesses. It does not fit the professions of France and Germany. It
also does not explain why the coming of codes to most American professions (and
trades) actually coincided with the reinvigoration of corporatism in American life
after the turn of the century. Throughout this paper I shall distinguish between indi-
vidual professionalism and bureaucratic professionalism, referring, loosely, to the
Anglo-American and Continental professional traditions. In the former, professional
associations are associative bodies of relatively autonomous professionals. In the lat-
ter, professional organization and association stem from central authority, usually the
state, with the result that individual professionals are considerably less autonomous
(see Mousnier 1979; Brunschwig 1974). A good current example of extreme bureau-
cratic professionalism is Soviet medicine (Field 1957).
861
(see, e.g., Dorwart [1953] on the reforms of advocates and procurators

Frederick William I imposed in 1713 to speed the flow of cases in
the courts).
A fifth property of professional ethics is the peculiar division and
balance of the injunctions themselves. In general, obligations toward
fellow professionals predominate, especially those that restrain competi-
tion for clients, such as pricing policies, rules against client stealing, and
the like (Heermance 1924; Millerson 1964; Landis 1927). The guarantees
to client trust that Parsons (1951), Goode (1957), and others have seen
as fundamental take up a small space in ethical codes, although cases
involving them generally lead to the harshest punishments (Carlin 1966;
Millerson 1964). In part this may be a matter of the easier measurability
of collegial relations, especially financial ones. Yet some common inter-
collegial proscriptions (e.g., those against maligning a colleague) involve
phenomena that are no more measurable than those in rules about
provision of service. Under individualistic conditions, specific service
obligations for the whole profession are absent from the ethical codes
of the professions. Thus, the American Bar Association's Code of Profes-
sional Responsibility, although it accepts the notion of the profession's
responsibility to provide service, declares that that obligation falls di-
rectly on individual professionals. There is no provision for corporate
supervision of this discharge of corporate duties. In most ethics codes
there is a preamble outlining a vague service ideal that is presumed to
be the ground for all the further prescriptions (for a particularly interest-
ing example, see the American realtors' code, discussed by Pontius
[1976]). Both under bureaucratic conditions (Meyers 1976; La Vopa
1979; Field 1957) and under individualistic ones (Peterson 1978; Reader
1966; Konold 1962; Auerbach 1976) the provision of necessary public
service has been the fundamental ethical claim and obligation of the
professions. As Reader (1966) points out, even the purchase system of
the 18th-century British army was defended on the grounds that the in-
dependence it guaranteed was a necessary condition of good service to
the country.
In summary, formal ethical codes or enforcement mechanisms are nearly
universal in the professions and, in societies as diverse as contemporary
America and prerevolutionary France, in business life as well. In both
attitudes and actions individuals of high intraprofessional status seem
more compliant with these codes than do those of lower intraprofessional
status. Correlatively, large areas of professional function are served by
"ethically questionable" practitioners. Informal enforcement of ethics
among such peripheral groups seems impossible. Only effective competi-
tion (driving them out of business) or monopolistic licensure (including
them in the zone of formal enforcement) seems effective. Informal en-
862
Professional Ethics
forcement within the higher intraprofessional status, high-compliance

groups in fact enforces everyday norms more than formal codes. Formal
enforcement seems to reflect the visibility of the offense and also its
violation of public (as opposed to intraprofessional) injunctions. Out-
side of the bureaucratic professionalism of the Old Regime, professional
ethics has been extremely individualistic in concept and practice. Indeed
practical association with general public obligation is sometimes dispar-
aged. Finally, ethical obligations themselves are mixed in kind and
number. General public service obligations are extremely important as
claims but extremely vague as rules. Obligations to clients are few and
relatively specific, and their direct violation leads to the most radical
sanctions. Intraprofessional rules are both numerous and detailed, yet
their violation leads to less extreme response. This is the general pattern
that theories of professional ethics must explain.
II. THEORIES OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
Since most theorists analyze professional ethics within general discus-

sions of professional evolution, theories of professional ethics divide along
the lines dividing those general discussions. One school, that of the im-
perative functionalists, interprets professional ethics as being required
by the emerging fiduciary character of professional services. Another, the
monopolists, has made the anticompetitive functions of ethics central.
These theories are not mutually exclusive. Since they are functional in
logical form, they may be valid simultaneously. But they have generally
been presented as alternatives and deserve separate consideration and
analysis."1
The functionalist view of professional ethics has a long history in soci-
ology, reaching from Carr-Saunders and Wilson (1933) and Marshall
(1965) to Parsons (1939, 1951, 1952, 1968), Goode (1957), and others.
According to this theory, professionals deliver expert services the quality
of which cannot be judged by the client. Those services are, in many
instances, not easily measurable by anyone (for an early view of this
problem, see Taeusch [1925]). Relatedly, many professions provide ser-
vices whose outcome in individual cases cannot be guaranteed although
they can be presumed to maximize statistically the likelihood of positive
11 I am here following Stinchcombe (1968, pp. 80-101). Functional explanations at-

tribute changes in phenomena to changes in their effects, as in the familiar cyber-
netic example of explaining a furnace's behavior by the temperature registered by its
governing thermostat. If there are several functions to be served-several heated
rooms with separate thermostats-then all the functional loops are relevant simulta-
neously, and conditions determining their relative effects must be specified. For a de-
tailed discussion of the logic of functional explanation and the issue of multiple loops,
see the work of Wimsatt (esp. 1972, pp. 17-41).
863
results for the client. These properties require special means of control
to protect clients. Such controls are found in normative codes that are in
turn embodied as formal professional ethics. Even though they are quite
aware of interprofessional competition and its relation to ethicality (Goode
1960), the functionalists have thus interpreted professional ethics as de-
riving ultimately from the inherent social danger of uncontrolled expertise.
This functionalist theory accords well with many of the basic facts of
professional ethics. It predicts their virtually universal distribution in
professions. Under normal functionalist assumptions about structured
social strains (that those on the periphery of a group are most heavily ex-
posed to them; see Parsons [1951 ]., chap. 7), it predicts the rough parallel
between conformity and intraprofessional status. It predicts the individ-
ualism of professional ethics by assigning analytical priority to the
professional/client relation. Yet the functionalist theory has some major
problems with the data as well. Insofar as they are subject to direct
market controls, businesses, on the functionalist model, do not require
professional ethics. Yet a majority of businesses have them and
many treat them with some seriousness. Parsons's (1951, p. 471) attribu-
tion of the predominance of informal enforcement in medicine to the
need for building the confidence of the physician so that he can take
justified risks does not generalize well to other professions, such as
engineering, that display similarly low rates of both formal and informal
sanctions. The individualist assumptions of the functionalist approach
fail where the underlying ground of professional ethics is bureaucratic
regulation, as in the Old Regime or the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the
functionalist approach has no obvious explanation for the preponderance,
not of obligations to clients, but of obligations to colleagues, in profes-
sional codes. While Parsons (1952) did discuss a need for solidarity
among lawyers in order to facilitate mediation between parties in extreme
conflict, such a view hardly accounts for the importance of colleague
obligations in medicine, accounting, and engineering.
The shortcomings of the functionalist school have made it a favorite
target for those theorists who attribute to professional ethics the func-
tion, not of control, but of aggrandizement. As argued by Berlant (1975),
the general version of this monopoly theory finds the functional cause
of ethics codes in their deliberate and latent economic effects. Auerbach's
(1976) similar analysis of legal codes takes the more limited position
that reforming professional elites have used ethics to control the rest of
the profession. Recognizing the inherent assumptions of the monopoly
argument, Larson (1977) restricts it to the "market" professions, ruling
out such groups as clergy and military from the start.
The monopolist model makes strengths of the functionalists' weaknesses
and vice versa. The extension of ethics codes into business is strong
864
Professional Ethics
positive evidence. So is the relation of enforcement to visibility. The

alliances of professions with strong bureaucratic states (and their con-
sequent lack of purely individual ethics) reflects a similar pursuit of
power. The emphasis on colleague obligations is nothing but legalized
restraint of trade. Thus, the problems of the functionalist account are
solved. But the existence of codes among such nonmarket groups as the
social workers, teachers, and newspaper editors is an embarrassment. So
are the demonstrated inability of ethics to provide an effective profes-
sional monopoly (see, e.g., Konold 1962; Gelfand 1978) and the em-
phasis, in formal enforcement, on violations of client obligation. Like
the functionalists in the inverse case, the monopolists can only reply to
these criticisms that the failure of the professions to attain their goals
does not rule out their intent to succeed.
In many ways the two views simply offer inverse interpretations of
similar phenomena. For functionalists, the correlation of status and ethics
reflects structural strain on the periphery. For monopolists it signifies
a successful monopoly extending its control. For the one group the claim
of social benefit is the functional foundation of professional authority.
For the other it is a legitimation for collective mobility.
A third possible approach to professional ethics would focus less on
the functionality of the constituent elements of professional organization
than on the functionality of the professional phenomenon as a whole for
certain social groups. Ben-David (1963) has seen the professions as open-
ing new opportunities for the middle classes, a position which Bled,stein
(1976) has reemphasized more recently. Despite their differing emphases
(Ben-David analyzes social organization while Bledstein analyzes culture),
the two authors imply that the social and cultural phenomenon of profession-
alism defended part of the middle class against the newly dominant social
world of corporate capitalism by conferring honor, dignity, and security
independent of salaried employment. Although neither of the two states
that professional ethics made a direct contribution to this maintenance of
extraprofessional status, their work implies that the relation of these
two phenomena must be investigated in detail.
III. ETHICS, SERVICE, AND STATUS
In one very general sense the connection between ethics and status
within a given social group is tautological. Ethical compliance is a particu-
lar type of compliance with social rules. It is compliance based, not on
coercion, regulation, or calculation, but on adherence to certain general
principles that presumably are socially generated and sustained. Status
is position in some socially generated ranking. It seems a truism that
claims of superior ethicality, as claims of superior compliance with socially
865
generated rules, are essentially claims of superior status or honor. It is

true that deviance often has a certain charisma and may thereby gain
in status (Douglas 1970). But in general, compliance and status must
coincide because the same social group generates both the rules followed
and the admiration conferred. Ihus it seems logical to ground an account
of professional ethics on the relation between ethics and status. Indeed,
such an account successfully generates all the basic properties of profes-
sional ethics discussed in Section I above.'2
In competitive status systems, ethics codes are universally distributed
because the claims of service they contain are claims to high social status.
If recognized by society, such claims confer that status irrespective of
the group involved-business or profession, hereditary or meritocratic.
Service confers status because through it a group claims corporate neces-
sity or even irreplaceability within society. In corporative societies such
as Old Regime France or traditional India, all individuals were presumed
to provide service, and service groups themselves were ranked by degree
of necessity, purity, or some other criterion (Mousnier 1979; Dumont
1972). In noncorporative societies claims of service are somewhat less
conscious but no less universal, as the trade association codes reveal
(Heermance 1924; Hill 1976).13 The immediate reason for this connection
of status and service lies in the mechanism creating the status hierarchies.
The functional theory of social stratification is followed not only by
sociologists but also by individuals constructing the occupational maps
12 The concept of ethical compliance here is quite close to Weber's conception of value
rational action (Weber 1964, pp. 115-18). Also, I am well aware that a sizable body
of excellent research on correlates of prestige shows that income and education are
the chief determinants of status in its standard operational form of occupational pres-
tige (see Treiman [1977] for an overview). The reader steeped in that tradition may
view this paragraph as argued ceteris paribus with respect to those correlates. How-
ever, I believe that such a reading is unnecessary. First, I am arguing at a purely
theoretical level and see no theoretical reason why the present argument should not
be plausible. Second, a significant literature in social psychology argues that, at least
in small groups, this argument's predictions of a connection of compliance and status
are borne out (Ridgeway 1978, 1981). Third, I am directing the argument at a more
general concept of status than is actually used in the status attainment literature,
which Horan (1978) has aptly labeled as theory laden. Status here includes all kinds
of entitlements to deference in interaction and does not accept as given the equation
of status with occupational prestige.
13 One might argue that the more competitive a society's status system is, the more
strident the claims of service will be. Operationalizing degree of competitiveness, how-
ever, would be difficult. It should be clearly noted that the distinction between the
status systems of corporative and noncorporative societies is not by the degree of
competition for status but rather by its locus. The cultural emphasis in the one is
more on group mobility, in the other it is on individual mobility. This is not, how-
ever, a rigid distinction. Even in noncorporative societies such as 19th-century En-
gland, service claims were made by groups as a whole, as Larson (1977) has argued,
although they were often illustrated by individual examples and argued with an indi-
vidualist rhetoric.
866
Professional Ethics
sociologists study, as Coxon and Jones (1978) have shown. The connection
of service and status is therefore not a fixed social fact but, rather, a
general cultural rule governing a process by which claims of service are
made by professional or other groups and ratified or rejected by the
larger public.
If service claims assert status by asserting functional importance or
necessity, claims of disinterested service augment this assertion by purify-
ing it of ulterior goals. They remove the ambiguity of motive inherent in
service for profit or personal gain.14 Like claims of service-based status,
claims of status from disinterested service extend well beyond the profes-
sions. They are common throughout business and undergird the notion
of "an honest profit" (Sutton et al. 1962; Baumhart 1968). Thus, one
would expect that groups whose disinterested service is culturally presumed
would lack specific ethics codes. The 20th-century Protestant clergy are
a possible example.15
In the modern WATest, the disinterested service claims of the current
professions are continuous with earlier status claims of the absolutist era.
High status in the Old Regime reflected service to God and the state
(Sewell 1974). This general ranking was given detailed degrees by levels
of commerce and manual labor, again reflecting the importance of dis-
interest (in the former case) and irreplaceability (in the latter) in deter-
mining social status. Indeed, the status of disinterest was taken to its
ascetic limits by such professional groups as the English barristers, some
of whom endured a career stage of near poverty. In the 19th century,
however, the new professionalism chronicled by Reader (1966) and
Bledstein (1976) confronted the implicit service claims of these earlier
elites with explicit claims. By introducing explicit self-regulation, apothe-
caries and solicitors forced physicians and barristers to make their own
14 Paradoxically, they thus often confer still greater status on those whose disinterest
is enabled by already high status, e.g., the nobility. Disinterested service claims are
the foundation of noble codes of honor, which are the aristocratic equivalent of pro-
fessional codes of ethics. It is precisely during those periods when events made claims
of the aristocracy to disinterested service most dubious that noble codes of honor
experienced their most flagrant expansion (e.g.,. 17th-century France; see Vagts [1959],
pp. 66 ff.).
15 Thus, an Episcopal clergyman in the United States may be tried for crime, immo-
rality, or "conduct unbecoming a clergyman." Other than these offenses-all clearly
associated with the corporate reputation of the church-the only offenses are viola-
tions of doctrinal codes of belief or ritual and habitual neglect of work (Protestant
Episcopal Church 1961, canon 53). The Methodist rules are quite similar (Methodist
Publishing House 1956, sec. 921). There is little of the detailed specification of col-
league and client obligation that makes up a typical professional code. Such vague
regulations make a transition between the bureaucratic regulation of the Roman Cath-
olic church and the extreme localism of the Congregationalists. For a specific ethical
code for clergy, see Landis (1927, pp. 66-68). On the general subject of clergy codes
in the 1920s, see Batten (1922).
867
claims visible. It seems fair to conclude, then, that the universal distribu-
tion of ethics codes reflects the corporate claims of service, particularly
of disinterested service, made in them.
The importance of disinterested service to corporate professional status
also predicts the correlation of enforcement with visibility of offense and
the harsher enforcement of rules of client obligation. Visible offenses
and client offenses threaten professional (or business) claims more than
do invisible offenses or offenses against colleagues. This is true for the
nonmarket professions as well as for the market ones. "Conduct un-
becoming a clergyman" (see above, n. 15) specifies in advance an un-
foreseen offense defined, essentially, by public attention alone.
By itself, the identification of disinterested service claims as funda-
mental to extraprofessional status accounts for some but not all of the
basic properties of professional ethics. To understand the role of status
considerations in determining the rest of these properties we must discuss
the implications of corporate service claims for both interprofessional
status rivalries and intraprofessional structure.
The corporate nature of service claims implies two things. First, it
implies that the group is the unit of extraprofessional status; individuals
receive that status only by virtue of membership. Second, it implies
that the corporate group itself must take control of individuals within
it; it must make the claims good. In contexts where occupational groups
are in competition for status, both of these conclusions imply that the
group requires sharp boundaries in order to deny its status to outsiders
and to avoid responsibility for their failures. This necessity explains
why most codes of professional ethics forbid professionals to deal with
outsiders, explicitly limiting collegiality to the accepted membership. The
charlatans provide the foil necessary to internal professional unity (cf.
Erikson 1966). Where the two groups could not be differentiated by
actual degree of service, "ethical" professionals could at least set them-
selves apart by proclaiming economic disinterest (see, e.g., Konold 1962,
p. 19; Gelfand 1978; Ramsey 1977).16 At the same time, in the absence
of the bureaucratic controls of the absolutist states, the need to make
good the service claims requires some kind of internal mechanisms of
control. These internal mechanisms are of three types-entry controls,
formal behavioral controls (the formal rules in ethics codes), and every-
day, informal controls. The importance and the relations of these controls
have changed systematically since the Old Regime. A brief historical analy-
sis will reveal the consequences of these changes.
16 In cases where competence alone makes the distinction between insiders and out-
siders-e.g., in most of contemporary American medicine-this extra motivation for
underlining economic disinterest is absent. It is thus not a problem that the sections
of the American Medical Association code that prohibit referrals to osteopaths and
chiropractors have been attacked in the courts.
868
Professional Ethics
In the culture of the absolutist period, gentility alone guaranteed all

three types of professional control. It was a necessary condition of ad-
mission, a presumptive guarantee of individual character (and thereby
of individual ethicality), and a hereditary obligation for social service.
Under such conditions there were no formal controls or ethical codes other
than those imposed by the state itself-the oaths and re'glements of the
corps d'arts in France, the bureaucratic rules of the Prussian state. The
middle classes attacked this position in two ways. First, they asserted
that character could be acquired through liberal education.17 Character
itself would then guarantee individual ethicality. Second, they advanced
various formal controls over their professional groups, both entry controls
and formal ethical controls, as evidence of a more explicit and purer
commitment to disinterested service. Best exemplified by the case of the
English apothecaries from the Apothecaries Act of 1815 to the Medical
Act of 1858, these controls challenged openly the implicit service claims
of the higher branches and, thereby, their status. (See Reader [1966]
and Carr-Saunders and Wilson [1933] for brief histories of the apothe-
caries. For another interesting example, see Reid [1974] on Sharia lawyers
in early 20th-century Egypt.)
The exact history of this status challenge does not concern us. Its im-
portance lies in the social form it created. By offering explicit guarantees
of professional behavior, the new controls placed an intermediary between
the individual professional and the general service claims of the profession.
Allegiance to professional controls replaced the individual service com-
mitment that was implicit under the earlier control through gentility.
The group as a whole explicitly claimed status for its disinterested
service. But its members claimed extraprofessional status implicitly,
through their membership in the group. This membership was underlined
and celebrated by allegiance to professional controls. In refusing a split
fee, in praising other professionals, in avoiding advertising and the theft
of clients, professionals affirmed their membership in the group whose
disinterested services gave it high extraprofessional status. The same as-
sertion was made by the refusal to consult or consort with the lower-status
outsiders. The preeminence of colleague relations in ethics codes thus
17 This middle-class emphasis on character as a guarantee of ethical professional be-

havior (which in turn confers extraprofessional status) is conflated with the middle-
class sense of character as a result of types of education that confer status in and of
themselves. The concepts of liberal education, culture ginerale, and Bildung thus play
(at least) a dual role in middle-class status claims. The sources on these subjects are
vast. On the corporative relation of status to educational structures and goals, see
Ringer (1979). On the role of liberal education in the British professions generally,
see Reader (1966). The interplay of aristocratic and middle-class status claims and
their bases in Germany is brilliantly analyzed by Rosenberg (1958), whose final chap-
ter discusses the triumph of the middle-class ideal in the Prussian civil and military
service.
869
reflects the function of the codes in asserting the solidarity of members.

This function has become more important with the disappearance of such
formal rituals of solidarity as the feast days and corporate marching of
the French confraternities.18
The mediating role of the new professional ethics did not imply that
individual professionals could not directly claim the high extraprofessional
status due to disinterested service. At the local level, they could and
did (see, e.g., Barlow 1898; Long 1937). Such claims are commonly made
by contemporary representations of professionals in the media (Gitlin
1977). But this mediating role did imply that, in general, individual
allegiance to the group, pledged by compliance with group rules, would
become the fundamental guarantee of disinterested service. No single
lawyer's work led directly to justice. That could be realized only by the
adversary system as a whole. Thus, the two levels of ethics noted at the
outset, corporate obligation and individual obligation, could and often
did become separated.
With the separation of individual and corporate obligation arose the
possibility for a process that I shall call ethical regression. The assiduous
practice of formal individual ethicality might be pursued to the point
of conflict with corporately claimed and publicly ratified service obliga-
tions.19 Examples of such ethical regression are common. American
physicians of the last century required a patient to dismiss an attending
irregular before they would take the case, even in emergencies (Konold
1962, p. 25). Modern American lawyers are considered more profes-
sionally ethical the more they withdraw from certain areas and settings
of practice (Carlin 1966, chap. 5), although these are areas where
much of the nation's personal law is transacted. On ethical grounds,
lawyers of high intraprofessional status at first opposed workmen's com-
pensation panels designed to remedy obvious injustices of the contempo-
rary adversary system, at the same time as they disparaged the contingent
fee bar that provided the adversary services (Auerbach 1976; but see
also Steidle 1972). Physicians' similar opposition to prepaid practice of
all types, on similar ethical grounds, is yet another example (Stevens
1971, chap. 7). Also relevant is Laumann and Heinz's (1977) finding
18 Language underlines this function as well. In both law and medicine, what are now
called canons of ethics were once interchangeably referred to as legal or medical eti-
quette (Dicey 1867; Flint 1883). A particularly elegant example of the connection of
disinterested service claims, ethics, ritual, and status is American advertising (Baur
1941, 1942).
19 J use the term "regression" following Abbott (1981). There, I used it to describ
process in which professionals withdrew from professionally impure but perhaps so-
cially important areas of practice into a more purely professional but limited area of
practice. Although the confusion of this usage with the usage denoting retrograde
motion in time is unfortunate, the reference to withdrawal into purity, in this case
ethical purity, seems to justify it.
870
Professional Ethics
that pro bono work (free legal service) is a negative correlate of intra-
professional status (the strongest correlate in their data) even while
reputation for conformity with professional ethics codes is a strong posi-
tive correlate.
The phenomenon of ethical regression underlies the empirical correla-
tion of ethical behavior and intraprofessional status. If the colleague
obligations of ethics codes serve principally to affirm membership and
solidarity, then violators impugn the group itself and must take a lower
rank within it. Yet large areas of professional work normally demand
violations of such exclusive group allegiance. Solo professionals must often
practice in contexts where negotiated situational rules derive from inter-
professional rivalry and conflict. (See, esp., Carlin 1962, 1966.) Surrender
to these situational ethics often involves violations of formal colleague
obligations as a virtually necessary condition of the provision of service.
Criminal defense work is an excellent example (Blumberg 1967) as is
much work done by salaried professionals.20 Such work is less impure in
terms of professional knowledge (Abbott 1981) than it is ethically suspect.
Indeed, it may surrender not only collegial ethics but also disinterested-
ness. Thus the general correlation of positive attitudes and actions toward
professional ethics with high intraprofessional status reflects the function
of formal colleague obligations, the largest section of most ethics codes,
in celebrating personal allegiance to the group. Considerations of individual
intraprofessional status and ethical behavior may thus essentially require
withdrawal from the important areas of service which the profession claims
as its basis for extraprofessional status. This contradiction divides the
mature profession into a high intraprofessional status, highly intraprofes-
sionally ethical core and a lower status, less ethical periphery that pro-
vides much of basic professional service.2'
The focus of ethical codes on the individual follows both from this
mediating function of individual allegiance to the professional group and
from the corresponding ambivalence about direct social obligation. As
individual allegiance to the professional group becomes the essential mark
of membership and its extraprofessional status, the individual level becomes
the important level of measurement. Hence individual obligations and
problems become the focus of ethical attention. At the same time, service
20 This dilemma is especially clear in professions largely made up of salaried profes-
sionals. Rothstein (1969) has pointed out that professional ethics in engineering was
at first directed almost completely at the small minority of the profession in private
practice. Yet the susceptibility of employed engineers to external influence has been
a steady theme in writings on the profession (see, e.g., Perrucci and Gerstl 1969 and
Shinn 1978). When engineering ethics was first discussed, then, employed engineers
were unethical a priori.
21 This division complements and reinforces the similar division based on purity of
professional knowledge (Abbott 1981). Foreign medical graduates in America are an
excellent example.
871
claims confront the professions with a dilemma. The claims themselves

are necessary to group advancement. But fulfilling them may require dis-
loyalty to the group, through the violation of the collegial obligations
that celebrate group cohesion and ethical purity. Professions therefore
often reiterate service claims but seldom lead in measuring their realiza-
tion. Sometimes this ambivalence reveals itself in the creation of radical
or reform groups that reemphasize service obligations (Perrucci 1973;
Powell 1979), sometimes in the existence of special mechanisms for
overcoming the weight of internal etiquette (see, e.g., the discussion of
the elite nucleus in Janowitz [1971]). Where state support can be con-
trolled or co-opted, professions may accept greater degrees of surveillance
of overall function. This may explain the case of public health, accepted
with real difficulty in America (Stevens 1971) but with somewhat less
ambivalence in England (Brand 1965). Under bureaucratic conditions,
where service claims are ratified directly and group boundaries firmly
established by state authority, supervision of aggregate provision of ser-
vices does not represent such a threat to professional status and hence
meets less professional resistance (see, e.g., Gelfand 1978; Shinn 1978;
La Vopa 1979; Cipolla 1976). But in individualistic professionalism, the
threat of overall service measurement leads to a focus (in ethics) on in-
dividual commitments to the profession.
Professional ethics thus helps determine extra- and intraprofessional
status by measuring, in effect, the purity of motives-the motives of
profession toward society and of professional toward profession. It defines
the relation of the profession to society as being important without ex-
pectation of undue return. It defines the relation of individual to profession
as one of allegiance and collegiality. Taken together these status aspects
of professional ethics account for the universal claims of disinterested
service, the positive correlations of ethicality with intraprofessional status
and of enforcement with visibility, the preponderance of intraprofessional
regulation, and the individualistic level of ethical injunctions. In thus
explaining the full range of formal ethical behaviors in the professions,
the status argument surpasses the functionalist and monopoly arguments.
It does not, however, replace them but instead adds a dimension missing
in single-concept approaches to professional ethics.
IV. STATUS, FUNCTION, AND MONOPOLY
Like the functional and monopoly theories discussed in Section II, the
present argument is functional in form (see above, n. 10). Determining
the relations among the three theories is thus not a question of acceptance
or rejection. A phenomenon like professional ethics is invariably in-
volved in maintaining several effects at once. The important problem in
872
Professional Ethics
relating the theories is to specify the conditions under which the three
effects-control of expertise, monopoly, and high status-reinforce or
cancel one another.
As a first approximation one expects that the degree of concern with
professional ethics will reflect the number of these three functional
patterns operating at a given time. Absolutist conditions are thus the
simplest case, in that, under them, none of the loops discussed operates
independently of the state structure. Control of expertise is provided
by state surveillance, monopoly by statute and licensure, and high extra-
professional status by state decree. Under such conditions one expects
professional ethics as an independent phenomenon to atrophy. Such con-
ditions may have been approximated in Old Regime Prussia. In prerevolu-
tionary France, the powers of the state were sufficiently weak on the
periphery to make all three loops somewhat more important, as Gelfand's
(1978) study shows.22
Where all three patterns are effective simultaneously, the power each
exercises over professional ethics reflects two variables: first, the strength
of the forces disturbing the ends maintained-control of expertise, mo-
nopoly, and high status-and, second, the availability of alternate means
of pursuing these ends. Thus, other things being equal, where monopoly
is most threatened (e.g., in American professions during the Jacksonian
era; see Nash [1964]) one expects professional ethics to emphasize monop-
oly goals. But when alternate strategies toward those goals become avail-
able (e.g., monopolistic licensure in 20th-century American law and
medicine), the monopoly function exercises less power over professional
ethics. The functional pattern of causation implies that the history of
professional ethics is in fact a history of these disturbing forces (or ten-
sions, in Stinchcombe's [1968] terminology) and of alternate strategies
for dealing with them.
One can briefly identify these major tensions and alternatives. The chief
threats to a profession's monopoly are competing professions (or para-
professions) and individualism within the profession itself. The major
22 A very interesting example of professional ethics under absolutist conditions is the

Russian medical profession (Field 1957). There is direct state surveillance, statutory
monopoly, and state-ordained status (if we can regard income as an indicator vari-
able for this case). One therefore expects professional ethics, at least as the organized
social phenomenon we have discussed here, to disappear. As far as my sources indi-
cate, this has happened. At the same time, Soviet physicians are placed in a deep
quandary by their position as arbitrators of access to many such personal resources
as extra food, days off, and certain types of employment. Medical decisions have non-
medical consequences that enter into the negotiation of diagnosis. While individual
Soviet physicians clearly recognize this as an ethical dilemma in the ordinary sense,
they have no formally organized approach to it. Indeed, they cannot, because a for-
mal professional ethics would imply limits to state legitimacy. It is likely, of course,
that there are informal ethical norms of various kinds and distribution that deal with
this problem (Haug 1976).
873
alternative to the professional ethics approach to monopoly is monopolistic

or semimonopolistic licensing. The chief threats to a profession's status
again come from competing professions, although shifts in public and
state demands are important as well. The alternative method of status
enhancement is direct manipulation of status systems, whether public or
governmental, through politics, advertisement, and the like. These manip-
ulations nearly always come down to claims of service or necessity that
are merely more public versions of the typical service claims made in
ethics codes. The chief threats to controlled expertise come from profes-
sional individualism and from the immeasurability of professional output.
The major alternatives to ethical control are various combinations of
internal and external informal and formal surveillance-bureaucracy, tort
liability, and so on.23
With this model of tensions and alternatives in mind, we may develop
a more systematic account of certain recent developments in professional
23 It is useful to discuss the basic alternatives to professional ethics that are usually
suggested. (For a more general review of issues of control in the professions, see
Johnson [1967].) The bureaucratic approach to professional control has a long his-
tory. Although new to the United States, utilization reviews and professional stan-
dards review organizations (PSROs; see Goran et al. 1975) have their precedents in
the French and Prussian Old Regimes. The advantages and disadvantages of such bu-
reaucracy are well known. On the one hand, it provides a potentially adequate mea-
sure of individual professional encounters. It mandates controls through fiscal sanc-
tions. It can allow autonomy through the peer system. On the other hand, it can
generate irrelevant material that hides real offenses; its likelihood of routinization
(and consequent inefficacy) is near certainty; its cost, both for profession and state,
is quite high. The loosened form of bureaucratic regulation found in contemporary
German law or British medicine seems to provide for more effective distribution of
services than any of the incentive schemes commonly suggested in the United States
(Rueschemeyer 1973; Stevens 1966; Lewis, Fein, and Mechanic 1976). However, this
may reflect the fact that both German law and British medicine are subject to direct
measurement of aggregate service provision, whereas neither PSROs nor the various
American health care incentive plans move beyond the level of influencing individual
professionals. An external control more characteristic of the Anglo-American context
is tort liability. Yet the rapid expansion of negligence concepts after the turn of the
century left the professions surprisingly unscathed. Professional negligence cases were
a relative rarity in American law before 1960 and professional liability a minor topic
in insurance texts (see Dietz, Baird, and Berul 1973). Tort liability does not in fact
represent a real alternative to bureaucratic control. As each new wave of liability has
threatened to engulf American trial courts, these have reacted by referring the major-
ity of the cases to accident boards, compensation commissions, and the like (Dimond
1953, 1960). Most of the available literature on actual professional controls indicates
that informal controls and entry controls are the most effective determinants of pro-
fessional behaviors (Freidson 1975; Carlin 1966; Bensman 1967). These sanctions
principally enforce routine professional standards instead of formal ethical rules. The
relation between entry and informal controls is clarified by Freidson's (1975) finding
that physicians interpret much professional misbehavior within a vocabulary of char-
acter. Other evidence on American medicine (Hall 1948, 1949) suggests that character
as a physician is perceived to be acquired by undergoing crucial experiences in the
training years. Indeed, American medical authors since the turn of the century have
emphasized this development of intraprofessional Bildung (see, e.g., Osler 1963). Sim-
ilar effects are seen in the discussion of American law by Chase (1979, 1980).
874
Professional Ethics
ethics in America. Medicine's great success in achieving monopoly through

licensure was evident by 1900 (Berlant 1975; Shryock 1967). The inte-
grated bar movement followed shortly thereafter (McKean 1963). Licen-
sure then became the focus of monopoly efforts, and the course of pro-
fessional ethics was freed from one of its three functional constraints.24
The two other functional loops are harder to assess. To some professions
the early 20th century brought new skills that made output harder than
ever to assess. Engineering is a possible example. In law, however, there
were no great changes in skills. Indeed, one might argue that the gradual
shift to corporate clients and law was a shift to an area where output
was measured more easily than in the personal law that had previously con-
stituted the typical practice (Friedman 1973). A similar argument could
be made for medicine, which in this period at last acquired some thera-
peutics that had measurable effects (Vogel and Rosenberg 1979). The
effect of skill changes on professional ethics is thus difficult to assess across
the various professions, at least at the turn of the century.
However, at that time, members of all professions suffered a decline
in status. This was first analyzed by Hofstadter (1955). The new corporate
society threatened the status of professions and professionals by firmly
anchoring general social status in wealth and power and by destroying
the localism of America's "island communities" (Wiebe 1967). On the
basis of the present theory, one would expect a general expansion of
professional ethics in the Progressive era in order to reclaim this lost
status. Even a cursory examination shows how correct this prediction is.
After a brief flirtation with a quasi-aristocratic pattern of ethical enforce-
ment through character (1903-12), the doctors reaffirmed their formal
enforcement procedures in 1912 (Konold 1962). The lawyers wrote a
new set of canons in 1908, the same year the architects issued their
rules. Ethics codes for accountants and consulting, electrical, civil, and
industrial engineers, as well as for such quasi-professional groups as
morticians, photographers, and life insurance underwriters, were instituted
between 1910 and 1919.
In none of these cases were the new ethical rules influenced deeply by
the Progressive ideal of expanding social services. While some professionals
did argue for ethical commitment to service (see, e.g., Brubacher 1927;
Taeusch 1926), their arguments had little effect on the codes themselves.
The American Bar Association Canons, for example, required that an
assigned defense attorney at least try to defend his client. That admoni-
24 Licensure really removed only part of the monopoly constraint, that part dealing
with external competitors. The threat arising from internal dissension and difference,
which I have loosely categorized as a tension to monopoly, remained as strong as ever
(see, e.g., Auerbach [1976] on contingent fee practice).
875
tion should indicate the actual level of professional expectations. This

professional indifference went unchallenged until the First World War
forced the professions to confront the practical reality of service demands
in the new corporate society.
At that time the overwhelming demands for professional services led
several professions, medicine being the most important, to confront the
issue of aggregate service directly. (See the various volumes of U.S. Sur-
geon General's Office [1921-28].) Following the war there was a general
ethics revival which owed much to the impetus of the service clubs,
Rotary in particular, and to social ethics concerns on the part of partic-
ular professionals as well as to the war experience (Gundaker 1922;
Whitaker 1922). In 1919 an Interprofessional Conference held in Detroit
sought to improve professional service as a whole through cooperation be-
tween professions. Although the cooperative endeavor folded rapidly, an
interprofessional committee subsequently produced a complete review of
ethical developments in the American professions and trades (King 1922).
The vast success of this ethics movement, at least in the production of
formal codes, is evident in the codes listed in Heermance (1924). Before
1910 only the major professions-medicine, law, architecture, and a few
others-had codes. No more than five trades are listed as having codes
by that time. Between 1910 and 1919 another five professions, eight semi-
professions, and 15 trades added codes. Another 20 professions and
semiprofessions and 78 trades formulated codes in the early 1920s.25
The rapid expansion of professional ethics after the war can be attrib-
uted only to issues of status. It was not the complexity of new skills
that called for ethical codes. Professions facing some of the most subtle
and difficult problems of skill control-social work and teaching, for
example-had a difficult time establishing codes at all.20 Nor was it the issu
of monopoly. For most professions and businesses, establishing monopoly
25 The codes reported for the older professions in Heermance (1924) are often re-
visions, not originals. I have used the original dates where I have known them. The
rapidity with which codes spread in this period was, of course, attributable partly to
a conscious effort. At the same time, the status functions of ethics implied that each
effort by one profession to improve its extra- and interprofessional status through
new professional ethics would reduce the relative positions of other professions. Thus
there is an explanation for contagion independent of conscious effort. This is a pre-
diction that could not be made from the functional loop maintaining control of skills.
26 This reflected the huge gaps between the kinds of codes typically promulgated and
effective control of esoteric skill. Much research literature attempted to bridge this
divide by the empirical study of codes (e.g., Landis 1927; Kingsbury and Hart 1937)
or of ethical beliefs and acts (e.g., National Education Association 1931; Elliott 1931).
But social workers, e.g., found little guidance in such projects. The codes of other pro-
fessions did not adapt effectively to the field, although they did give social workers
a nervous sense of the importance of a code (see Buell 1923). Effective ethics rules
emerged only in local chapters facing particular issues (Farra 1924; Elliott 1931).
There was no uniform code in social work until 1960.
876
Professional Ethics
through ethics codes was no longer a realistic possibility. Nor was it a

rededication to the provision and measurement of effective service-that
ideal had vanished with the failure of the attempts at interprofessional
cooperation. It seems most likely that the ethical enthusiasm that
brought codes to over a hundred professions and trades in the early
twenties was part of the working out of extra- and interprofessional status
anxieties set in motion by the rise of the new corporate society and first
confronted, between 1903 and 1912, by the relatively well-organized medi-
cal and legal professions. In this process, the service clubs not only
actively campaigned for codes, they also, along with the rest of America's
vast club life, played a more pervasive, passive role in making professionals
and businessmen acutely aware of the social status to be derived from
ethical and service claims. For there were wide variations in both kinds
of claims among the occupations of their members (Marden 1935). The
spread of ethical practice throughout their membership would both de-
crease the interoccupational status anxiety of those members whose occupa-
tions were less service oriented and increase the members' common ethical
and service claims to a status above the working classes. The ethics revival of
the twenties was thus fueled by the status functions of ethicality.
In the years since that revival, the effectiveness of licensure as a monop-
oly strategy has continued or increased. The interprofessional status hier-
archy has remained roughly fixed, although there has been minor jockey-
ing for position, which possibly has affected professional ethics (Hodge,
Siegel, and Rossi 1964). But in the more recent past, there has been a
professional ethics revival whose main impetus came from changes in skill,
a revival that was first evident in medicine in the late 1960s. This revival
in part reflected the turmoil of the period itself. In law, especially, social
issues gave strength to reformist groups and their pleas for corporate
responsibility (Powell 1979). There was thus some direct focus on the
level of corporate obligation. But the main ethical enthusiasm emerged
in medicine and reflected less a renewed feeling of corporate responsibility
than a vivid sense of professional skill. The movement took organizational
shape in the founding in 1969 of the Hastings Center, an "Institute of
Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences."27
One may analyze the nature of the current revival by studying the
ethical conceptions embodied in the Hastings Center's published material.
In the Center Report for 1976, for example, 10 of the 50 substantive
articles dealt with ethics as a general topic. Another 10 dealt with the
27 The center was created to "examine the difficult array of moral problems engen-
dered by advances in the biomedical, behavioral and social sciences" (Hastings Center,
n.d.). Throughout the 1970s it published a Report as well as diverse special documents
and monographs dealing with the teaching of professional ethics and similar topics.
The Hastings Center was not the only such organization. A Center for Applied Ethics
was founded at the University of Virginia in 1969 (Gothie 1973).
877
corporate obligations of the professions or with the general obligations of

individual professionals. This space allocation partly reflected the char-
acteristic pattern of formal professional ethics discussed in Section I
above. The remaining 27 articles, however, dealt with particular ethical
problems that demonstrated clearly that the revival originated from the
emergence of as yet uncontrolled skills. Some of the ethical problems
discussed were procedures whose very existence was seen to pose difficult
ethical dilemmas for professionals-amniocentesis, abortion, dialysis. Others
were concepts seen to hide similar dangers-minimal brain damage, the
right to die, hyperactive children. These cases share certain properties.
They are all created or exacerbated by effective medical science. They
are all seen to involve profound ethical issues-freedom and determinism,
truth and deception, life and death. They are all treated, both in these
articles and in the center's material on the teaching of ethics (1980), as
problems that face the individual professional case by case. They are not
to be decided by regulation, statute, or bureaucratic supervision. These
common properties portray the professional as a hero whose knowledge
and skill pose ethical questions transcending the routine issues of everyday
life (see also Fox 1959; Fox and Swazey 1974).
This portrayal has two separate but complementary effects on extra-
professional status because the professional heroism implied is at once
technical and ethical. As Shils (1965) has argued, the professions take
their shape from a series of socially defined problems of order which their
knowledge permits them to control. Professional practice is from the start
focused upon the control of central social problems. Indeed, it is ultimately
from effective contact with these problems that the professions derive
their high extraprofessional status (Abbott 1981). By conferring further
means of effective contact with the problems of order, the new skills
directly confer new grounds for extraprofessional status claims. At the
same time, the new skills present a problem of professional control, to
be handled, on the traditional functionalist argument, by renewed ethical
analysis and commitment. When accomplished, such commitment rein-
forces the professions' claims to disinterested service and to the extra-
professional status such service commands. Thus an ethics revival that
derived originally from the emergence of new skills results, by virtue of
the linkages of the various functional loops, in a further elevation of
extraprofessional status.28
28 This substantive effect may be formally demonstrated by the use of a signed graph
describing the situation.
-Professional Ethics Extraprofessional Status -- Status Threats

+ +
Control of Skills . - New SkillsJ
The existence of two functional loops involving the same explanandum (professional
878
Professional Ethics
This effect is enhanced further by the ethical dilemmas involved, be-

cause the derivation of extraprofessional status from effective contact with
central social problems applies not only to the professions' substantive
problems but to their ethical ones as well. Most ambivalence, ethical am-
bivalence included, is defiling or status degrading, as Douglas (1970) and
Dumont (1972) have argued. To the extent that an individual possesses
special means for facing ambivalence, however, that individual acquires
rather than loses status from the confrontation, especially if the ambiv-
alence is a profound and important one. For the consciously ethical profes-
sional, then, confrontations with ethical dilemmas enhance status. If one
is ready for it, there is something noble and charismatic in deciding who
gets the scarce treatment, in weighing the rights of state and individual,
in deciding to blow the whistle on the laundered data. Thus, while the
current ethics revival arose out of new skills, by a complex series of
mechanisms it has had important effects on extra- and intraprofessional
status as well.
There are other aspects of the current ethics revival that fit the model
here advanced. The phenomenon of ethical regression-the substitution of
individual conformity with ethics codes for aggregate surveillance of
professional service-is strongly evident. In this regard what the present
revival does not involve is as important as what it does. It does not
involve external surveillance or regulation. It does not involve the mea-
surement of routine professional service. It does not involve the important,
if less charismatic, dilemmas of mediocre practice, overcommitment of time,
and maldistribution of effort that many sociologists see as the basic issues
of professional control. In fact, it often tries to deny the existence of cor-
porate professional obligations altogether.29
ethics) allows the direct positive path from new skills to extraprofessional status to
be augmented by the positive path leading through control of skills and professional
ethics to extraprofessional status.
29 A good example of this aspect of ethical regression is the current debate over rates
at which caesarean sections are performed. While individual specialists may feel justi-
fied in ordering each individual operation, the net pattern in the United States at the
present time is one of rapid increase in the procedure. As there is little reason to be-
lieve in a real change in underlying rates of necessity, one is led to suspect attempts
to control work hours, to make excess profit, to retain physician dominance, and so on.
None of these hypotheses could be soundly derived or tested on a case-by-case basis,
although common ethical (and professional) theory would be that it is at that level
that such decisions are made a priori. The trend itself clearly indicates the possibility
of some sort of aggregate offense. This concept of aggregate offense is stochastic. It
seems sensible to assign to each ethical decision a gray area within which any decision
would be ethical (e.g., to perform or not perform a caesarean). Statistical theory then
tells us that our ability to identify significant offenses (departures of the observed
rates of surgery from hypothetically ethical ones under ceteris paribus assumptions)
increases with the number of cases observed. It is thus possible, under standard prob-
ability theory, to identify a significant difference between ideal and real at the aggre-
879
This brief discussion of patterns of professional ethics in the United

States since 1900 should make it clear that further studies of professional
ethics must take a complex view of the phenomenon. This is especially
true when one seeks explanations that transcend relatively narrow limits
in social space and time. Only when all of its functions are taken into
account and when all the disturbing tensions and alternative strategies
can be specified can there be an account of professional ethics that will
handle the market and nonmarket professions, the individualistic and
bureaucratic professional settings, and the shifting of the various functions
of professional ethics over time. As sociology increasingly confronts data
with historical and comparative dimensions, such complex analyses become
increasingly necessary.
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Professional Ethics

Author(s): Andrew Abbott

Through comparative analysis, this paper establishes five basic prop-

The sociological literature has examined two levels of societal demands

1 This paper grew out of a presentation at the Hastings Center, Hastings-on-Hudson,

?;/ 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

AJS Volume 88 Number 5 855

Carlin 1966; Freidson 1975) has empirically questioned the culturally

I. PATTERNS OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

5 Some definitions are necessary here. By status I mean a property of an individual

of the service areas claimed as professional jurisdiction are in fact served

to punish breaches of professional/client obligations more severely than

9 A good example of an attempt to measure the total provision of service by a pro-

the local surgical community (Gelfand 1978). Similar ties of authority

(see, e.g., Dorwart [1953] on the reforms of advocates and procurators

forcement within the higher intraprofessional status, high-compliance

II. THEORIES OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

Since most theorists analyze professional ethics within general discus-

11 I am here following Stinchcombe (1968, pp. 80-101). Functional explanations at-

positive evidence. So is the relation of enforcement to visibility. The

III. ETHICS, SERVICE, AND STATUS

generated rules, are essentially claims of superior status or honor. It is

In the culture of the absolutist period, gentility alone guaranteed all

17 This middle-class emphasis on character as a guarantee of ethical professional be-

reflects the function of the codes in asserting the solidarity of members.

claims confront the professions with a dilemma. The claims themselves

IV. STATUS, FUNCTION, AND MONOPOLY

22 A very interesting example of professional ethics under absolutist conditions is the

alternative to the professional ethics approach to monopoly is monopolistic

ethics in America. Medicine's great success in achieving monopoly through

tion should indicate the actual level of professional expectations. This

through ethics codes was no longer a realistic possibility. Nor was it a

corporate obligations of the professions or with the general obligations of

-Professional Ethics Extraprofessional Status -- Status Threats

This effect is enhanced further by the ethical dilemmas involved, be-

This brief discussion of patterns of professional ethics in the United

Bledstein, B. J. 1976. The Culture of Professionalism. New York: Norton.

Engelbourg, S. 1980. Power and Morality. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.

Horan, P. M. 1978. "Is Status Attainment Research Atheoretical?" American Socio-

Taeusch, C. F. 1925. "Fees and Charges as an Index of Professionalism." International

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