‘Professions’ have been subject to a variety of theoretical schema that attempt to identify their unique characteristics or traits: the features that can be regarded as the basis for the discrimination between forms of occupational organization and control that are professional and those that are not (Saks, 1983; Abbott, 1988). This elaboration of the essential traits of professions is more than a professional discourse. It remains an influential strand within the ‘sociology of the professions’ following from the Parsonian structural- functional analyses of professions (Greenwood, 1957; Goode, 1957; Parsons, 1968; cf. Robson and Cooper, 1990). Theorists have developed studies.
