职业自主性与国家干预——西方职业社会学研究述评

Professional Autonomy and State Intervention: An overview of the sociology of professions in the Western countries

本文是关于西方职业社会学研究的发展历程、基本概念、主要研究主题和理论辩论的一个述评。文章从职业的概念入手,对关于职业化的研究、职业自主性与职业地位、职业—国家关系等研究主题都作了概括性的论述和分析。第一部分介绍职业社会学发展史上界定“职业”、“职业化”等基本概念的各种努力及其批判;第二部分着重分析“职业自主性”与“职业地位”这两个相互联系的核心概念及其意涵,并试图将现有理论对这些概念的不同理解在各个维度上进行比较;第三部分由英美职业社会学的主流研究对国家干预的忽视入手,论述两个关于职业—国家关系问题的主要理论视角,并提出一个关于职业之间竞争与国家对这些竞争的规范的生态性理论。文章的结语部分讨论职业社会学研究对于整个社会学发展的普遍性意涵,并试图揭示这一研究领域的一些未来发展趋势。

This article provides an overview of the sociology of professions as developed in the Western countries, including its historical development, basic concepts, major research topics, and theoretical debates. It begins with the concept of profession and proceeds to discuss the research on professionalization, professional autonomy, professional status, and profession-state relations. The first section discusses the efforts in defining “profession' and “professionalization' as well as their critiques during the development of the sociology of professions. The second section analyzes the meanings of two core concepts, i.e., professional autonomy and professional status, and compares different theories on them from multiple dimensions. The third section starts from the negligence of state intervention in the mainstream Anglo-American research on the professions, discusses two major theoretical perspectives on profession-state relations, and seeks to propose an ecological theory on professional competition and regulation. The conclusion discusses the general implications of the research on the professions to the discipline of sociology and some potential trends in the field.