The system of professions

What is an ‘information professional’? For that matter, what is a ‘professional’? These questions are awkward because they are difficult to answer with precision or certainty. ‘The professions’ have been an object of study by sociologists for many decades, but only one author has meaningfully ventured into the information professions. The System of Professions is now somewhat elderly, but the foundational theory developed here is very well-suited to a field like Information – weakly delineated and continually evolving. The purpose of this review is to explore whether this classic sociological work, following its thirtieth birthday, might have new relevance to students and practitioners of both traditional and emerging information professions, given their rapidly changing work environments. Andrew Abbott is a professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and he served as the long-time editor of the American Journal of Sociology (2000–2016). This was his first book, notably winning the prestigious American Sociology Association’s Distinguished Scholarly Book Award (1991). Abbott’s own doctoral research had focused on the emergence of psychiatry as a profession; it was from this work that he abstracted his general conceptual model of professions as a ‘survival-of-thefittest’ ecology, and one that is set in a frequently changing social, epistemological, and technical landscape. Abbott’s distinctive contribution to the discourse is to methodically define professions wholly in terms of an elbows-out application of expertise; professions compete with each other for expertise-based jurisdiction over solvable problems. Competition