Lawyer, doctor, scientist--these are the jobs Americans commonly
cite when asked to list the most prestigious occupations. The word
"professional" today implies expertise, authority, and excellence.
To do a job professionally is to do it well. Yet in a society in
which knowledge has become a prized asset and an advanced degree
the ticket to wealth and power, the rise of professionalism has a
darker, more ominous side.
Power in the Highest Degree, one of the most comprehensive studies
of professionals ever undertaken, exposes professionalism as a
double-edged sword; it illustrates how experts have come to "own"
and control knowledge, much like the wealthy control capital,
thereby transforming capitalist and socialist society, both for
better and for worse. Knowledge long predates money as a source of
power and wealth in human society, and professionals are only the
most recent in a long succession of powerful knowledge classes that
have included shaman, witchdoctors, and the Confucian mandarins who
ruled China for over a thousand years.
Drawing on interviews with over 1,000 practicing professionals,
the authors show how, by dispensing self-interested and morally
colored judgements as scientific truth, modern professionals are
consolidating a monopoly over what passes for objective knowledge.
Experts discredit the ordinary knowledge of the general public to
generate a vast market of dependent clients. The result is a
powerful professional class that creates vital new knowledge and
life-saving services, but also wields growing influence over a
population deeply insecure about its ability to manage private and
public affairs without "expert" guidance.
This sweeping study also reveals that more and more experts are
abandoning private practice to work for corporations, becoming
junior partners in a new "Mandarin capitalism." While often
outspoken advocates of a more socially responsible business world,
professionals have joined big business to produce one of the most
pronounced divisions of mental and manual work in history, creating
a new dispossessed majority, the uncredentialed. We learn of an
experiment at Polaroid to give machine operators more
responsibility which is cancelled when managers and engineers
decided that they "just didn't want operators that qualified." The
authors argue that, as this new "mandarin" class radically
transforms the social order, it helps to reform some of the
traditional scourges of the business world, but also poses a new
threat to equality in America. To reverse this trend, they propose
a post-professional society that de-emphasizes skill hierarchies
and substantially democratizes knowledge.
A bold and incisive new work of social criticism, this book
provides a fascinating look at the modern professional and provokes
Americans to think in a new way about democracy in the age of
experts.
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