The Impact of Social Movements on a Profession in Process

Abstract

The process model of professions enables the observer to build internal conflict and change into an analysis of a given profession. An analysis of a new specialty in city planning—advocate planning—suggests that this model be extended so that social movements are seen to enter a profession through the creation of new specialties or segments. By showing that the new practitioners of advocacy planning were highly, though variably, influenced by social movement organizations of the 1960s, this paper suggests the outlines of conflict and difference within the new segment itself Based on interviews with 112 advocate planners in ten cities, the study finds the new practitioners to be young and of similar background to those composing the activist youth movements of their times in college and graduate schools. The differences among them, in regard to their orientation to politics and professionalism, are also examined in the light of new developments in the analysis of reform movements.