Practical knowledge and occupational control: The professionalization of architecture in the United States

An analysis of the formation of a discipline of architectural design in the United States in the first part of the 19th century emphasizes the relationship between the substantive content of professional expertise and the social structure of professional practice. As a newly constructed practice of design was threatened by broad changes affecting the structure of occupational control, explicit professionalizing projects emerged from the ideological organization of professional work itself. This paper identifies limitations of the market monopoly model and outlines an alternative view that focuses on the way the rhetorical dimensions of professional work organize the efforts of actors within a self-reproducing structure of occupational control. Analysis of the production of practical knowledge opens up new directions for research, incorporating the cultural dimensions of work into a macrostructural account of a profession and the processes of professionalization.

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