In popular usage the term ‘profession’ has a wide variety of connotations, spanning from a highly skilled and specialized job to any fulltime work from which income is derived (Freidson 1986). The boundaries of interpretation are narrower in sociology, but sociologists have also still to reach agreement about the meaning of the term ‘profession’ and the related question of which occupations are to count as professions. However, despite the absence of an unequivocal definition (Abbott 1988), most sociologists have for long acknowledged the growing importance of professions in Western industrial societies in the twentieth century. Millerson (1964), for instance, notes that roughly two dozen new qualifying associations were formed.
