The Will-O'-The-Wisp of Professional Status

Some aspects of the writer's “Teachers' Status in Australia“, an unpublished Ph.D. thesis of the Australian National University, Canberra.

Prestige Ratings of Occupations.

Bassett G. W. “Student Estimates of the Social Status of Teaching”. The Forum of Education, V, 2, 1946, 64–70.

Centers R. “Education and Occupational Mobility”. American Sociological Review, XIV, 1949, 143–144.

Congalton A. A. “Social Gradings of Occupations in New Zealand”. British Journal of Sociology, IV, 1, 45–49.

Congalton A. A. Havighurst R. J. “Status Ranking of Occupations in New Zealand”. Australian Journal of Psychology, VI, 2, 10–15.

Counts G. S. “The Social Status of Occupations”. School Review, XXXIII, Jan. 1925, 16–25.

Davies A. F. “Prestige of Occupations”. The British Journal of Sociology, III, 2, 134–147.

Deeg M. E. Paterson D. G. “Changes in the Social Status of Occupations”. Occupations (The Vocational Guidance Journal), XXV, 4, Jan. 1947, 205–207.

Hall J. Jones D. Caradog . “Social Grading of Occupations”. The British Journal of Sociology, I, 1, 31–51.

Lastrucci C. L. “The Status and Significance of Occupational Research”. American Sociological Review, XI, 78–84.

Taft R. “The Social Grading of Occupations in Australia”. The British Journal of Sociology, IV, 2, 181–187.

Welch M. K. “Ranking of Occupations on the Basis of Social Status”. Occupations, XXVII, 237–241.

The study of professions and their characteristics.

Anderson H. D. Davidson P. E. Recent Occupational Trends in American Labour. Stanford Univ. Press, 1945. (Esp. p. 17, where professions as a group are discussed, and Chapter IX, Professional Service.) “B”. “The Professions Under Socialism”, in the National Review No. 782, 310–317.

Carr-Saunders A. M. Wilson P. A. The Professions. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933.

Cunningham K. S. “Review of Professional Education in Australia”. The Year Book of Education. London: Evans Bros., 1950, 344–359.

Hillier E. T. Social Relations and Structures. New York: Harper & Bros., 1947, 544–580.

Lewis R. Maude A. The English Middle Classes. London: Phoenix House, 1949.

MacIver R. M. Society. A Text Book of Sociology. New York: Rinehart and Co., 1948. (P. 313 for a discussion on professional groups and their relationship to the modern state).

Marshall T. H. “The Recent History of Professionalism in Relation to Social Structure and Social Policy”. In Citizenship and Social Class, C.U.P., 1950.

Mills C. W. White Collar. The American Middle Classes. O.U.P., 1951. (Esp. Chap. 6, Old Professions and New Skills; Chap. 11, The Status Panic).

Parsons T. “The Professions and the Social Structure”. In Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied, Part II, Chap. VIII.

Pound R. “The Professions in the Society of Today”. New England Journal of Medicine, 1949, 241.

Tawney R. H. The Acquisitive Society. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1920.

Webb S. Webb B. “Special Supplement on Professional Associations”. The New Statesman, April 21, 1917.

Wilson L. The Academic Man (The Study in the Sociology of a Profession), O.U.P., 1942.

Znaniecki F. The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940.

“model”: This should not be confused with the term as used by the economists. Its meaning in this text is close to the Oxford Dictionary meaning of “archetypal image or pattern”. On the level of sociological terms it corresponds closely to Max Weber's “ideal type”, i.e. it implies a kind of normative pattern to which teachers seek to conform.

The New South Wales Teachers' Federation in support of its claim for higher salaries. Education, June 16, 1954, 54.

Cunningham K. S. “The Status of the Teacher”. Education News, 3, 2, 4.

Brown M. S. “Towards a Professional Status?” The Forum of Education, 3, 1, 8.

A review of Teachers' journals over this period bears out that teachers have always been concerned about the status of their occupation, e.g. “when the social position of the teacher shall have been raised to a par with the unquestioned utility of his office, … then, and not till then, shall the teachers be what they ought to be, models for the imitation of those around them, earnest and devoted schoolmasters, attached to their schools and their pupils, as is the doctor to his patients or the lawyer to his clients”. Australian Journal of Education, 2, 10, October 1869, 381.