The rise of professional associations was carried out under the popular slogans of modernization and reform, and this idealized image has continued to dominate not only the public but the academic views as well. The most widely accepted sociological description has been an idealized one. A profession is a self-regulating community (Goode, 1957: 194–200). It has exclusive power, usually backed up by the state, to train new members and admit them to practice. It practices its specialty according to its own standards without outside interference. It reserves the right to judge its own members’ performance, and resists incursions of lay opinion; it alone can decide whether to punish or disbar an incompetent member because presumably only it can decide what technical competence is. It has a code of ethics, claiming to dedicate its work to the service of humanity, pledging disinterested and competent performance, and condemning commercialism and careerism. With this description, it is not surprising that professions have been regarded as the saviors of the modern world. 1 Of course, not all “professions” quite live up to the model. The ideal definition is taken especially from medicine and extends fairly well to science, law, and architecture. It becomes strained when applied to engineers employed in large corporations or to teachers in bureaucratic school systems. With the increasing employment of traditional professionals like lawyers and scientists in bureaucracies, the sociology of professions has given much study to the problems of role conflict (eg, Kornhauser, 1962; Miller, 1967: 755–767). Related issues involve pseudoprofessions like social work and psychiatry, 1. During the ideological battles of the 1930s, Talcott Parsons (1939) argued that professions provided a third way between the selfishness of individualistic capitalism and the repressive collectivization of socialism. More recently, we have been told that the growth of professions has reversed the trend toward dehumanization in industrial bureaucracies, and professionalization has been held out as the answer to police brutality at home and military dictatorships abroad, as if to professionalize the agents of violence would turn them into paragons of altruism.