Professional Demarcation

Authority over educational standards and control of entry to professional positions, that is, autonomy with respect to the state, are commonly seen as characteristic features of a profession. However, this traditional concept of professionalization, largely cultivated by Anglo-American macro-sociological and historical research, cannot be easily applied to the uniqueness of the French 

Procfe-verbaux des seances du Conseil, 1.2.1893, A. SFC. Proces-verbaux des seances du Conseil, 26.11.1896, A. SFC. 

Nevertheless, the society occasionally did make timid attempts to defend the professional interests of its members. For example, in 1891 the council discussed a project presented by a representative of the Chambre syndicate des produits chimique to found a new Ecole de chimie pratique et industrielle. The aim was to provide chemists with special knowledge related to industrial and technical matters. A commission charged with the further elaboration of the plan was formed, and in the same year a booklet appeared (most probably written by members of the commission), publicly requesting the creation of a grande ecole de chimie. ° Although the proposal had no immediate repercussions, it seems to have had some influence in promoting the introduction of a fourth curriculum year within the already existing Ecole municipale de physique et de chimie industrielles, as well as the establishment of a laboratory for applied chemistry at the Paris Faculty of Sciences. 

While the council did discuss educational measures on the local scale, the society s professional lobbying was insignificant on the national level. The society did not take measures to harmonize the miscellany of educational standards, or to establish uniform licensing examinations for chemists. In fact, not all of the members of the council considered educational matters to be any part of the society s responsibilities. Wyrouboff, a chemist and philosopher of Russian descent, suggested that since the Societe chimique was a societe savante and not a societe pedagodique , it should deal with questions of high science only .  

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The last questions in the guidelines (see the preface) concern the issue of demarcation - or boundary drawing of the chemical societies. The authors considered how and to what extent the individual chemical societies reacted to the ongoing and incessantly negotiated social and professional demarcation of chemistry as a disdphne and a specific social entity. For the sake of simplicity the authors deliberations were based on the sociological theory of Thomas Gieryn (again, see the preface). 

Gieryn, Thomas F. 1983. Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists. The American Sociological Review 48 6 (December 1983) 781-95. 

Gieryn, Thomas F. 1983. Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science Strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. American Sociological Review 48 781-795. 

In an article that is very relevant to professional ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre imagined the case of J (somebody, jemand) who used to inhabit a social order, or rather an area within a social order, where socially approved roles were unusually well defined. Responsibilities were allocated to each role and each sphere of role-structured activity was clearly demarcated...The key moral concepts that education had inculcated into J were concepts of duty and responsibility [1]. In his... 

In the Czech Lands there existed a variety of strong professional groups of chemists which founded their associations in the second half of the nineteenth century (see Table 3.3), serving the interests of more demarcated circles of... 

The richly structured membership demonstrates that all three chemical societies had no pronounced policy of demarcation whether in statutes or in practice and were open to all those interested in joining. Although the lists of members do not distinguish chemists from non-chemists, there were evidently quite a few members who had no specialized chemical education. This shows that the societies were open to any professionals not only by their statutes but also in reality. Probably the only firm and almost insurmountable demarcation was affiliation to the linguistically Czech community. The SPCH membership of Carl Zulkowski, the only professor from the German Technical University Deutsche technische Hochschule) in Prague, was the exception that confirms the rule. 

For much of the nineteenth century, Britain was the largest and most dynamic industrial economy in the world. The size of the British economy and of the imperial British state created many employment opportunities for chemists. It is thus not perhaps surprising that Britain was one of the first countries to develop both a professional chemical community and chemical societies. Moreover, self-governing societies, be they learned, campaigning, professional or interest-based, played a prominent role within British, and particularly middle-class, society. By the First World War, British chemists operated in a dense institutional network in 1912, Official Chemical Appointments (OCA), the directory of chemical posts published by the British professional association of chemists, the Institute of Chemistry, listed 24 Societies and Institutions directly interested in the advancement of chemical science and technology . This complex social and professional world means that it makes little sense to discuss the demarcation of the British chemical community in terms of a single... 

If these definitions of profession and professionalization are used, what then was the contribution of the chemical societies It is clear that new professional posts were being created in late-nineteenth-century Britain, but this was primarily the consequence of economic, social and political changes over which the societies could claim little control. However, if we shift the emphasis from demarcation in terms of limiting entry to demarcation in terms of defining roles... 

Bolton, H. C. (1902), Chemical Societies of the Nineteenth Century, Washington. Brock, W. H. (1993), The Norton History of Chemistry, Norton, New York. Gieryn, T. F. (1983), Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists, American Sociological Review 48, 781-795. 

A focal question we were going to ask in the workshop was what we can learn about the process of professionalization of chemistry by studying the emergence of chemical societies in various European countries and their further development in the period before the First World War. In particular, it has been our ambition to explore in a comparative way the process of demarcation that inevitably takes place when a social institution of a scientific discipline is formed. Expansion, monopolization and protection of authority are three... 

Under discussion are those phenomena where - on the level of the single person - a complex mixture of fluctuating rational considerations, professional activities and emotional preferences and motivations finally merge into one of relatively few well demarcated resultant attitudes. These attitudes may be in the field (later denoted as dimension ) of religion, politics, education, habitation, occupation, economic standard, consumer habits, family, sport, etc. A single "attitude may, for instance, find an expression in the form of a religious denomination, in a vote for a certain political party or in membership of a certain income class. 

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