This collection of essays represents the first focused attempt to treat the professions in France as a single large historical problem. It is at once a contribution to the history of the professions and to the social history of France. The essays point toward a common conclusion: in the French context, by striking contrast to standard Anglo-American assumptions, professional "autonomy," power, and success virtually require "dependence" on the state.

The modern professions have a long history that predates the development of formal institutions and examinations in the nineteenth century. Long before the Victorian era the emergent professions wielded power through their specialist knowledge and set up informal mechanisms of control and self-regulation. Penelope Corfield devotes a chapter each to lawyers, clerics and doctors and makes reference to many other professionals - teachers, apothecaries, governesses, army officers and others. She shows how as the professions gained in power and influence, so they were challenged increasingly by satire and ridicule. Corfield's analysis of the rise of the professions during this period centres on a discussion of the philosophical questions arising from the complex relationship between power and knowledge.

Professions are central to any political sociology of major associations, organizations and venues in civil society underpinning democracy; they are not a subset of livelihoods in a mundane sociology of work and occupations. "Professions in Civil Society and the State" is at once elegant and startling in its directness and the sheer scope of its implications for future comparative research and theory. Not since Talcott Parsons during the early 1970s has any sociologist (or political scientist) pursued this line of inquiry. Sciulli s theoretical approach differs fundamentally from Parsons and rests on a breadth of historical and cross-national support that always eluded him. The sociology of professions has come full circle, leaving behind Parsons, his critics, and two generations of received wisdom.

Bringing together eight internationally known social historians from Europe and Israel, the book reveals the commonalities that link European societies together.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. History of Universities XXXIV/1 contains the customary mix of learned articles which makes this publication an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. This volume offers a global history of research education in the ninteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume compares the training of scholars in different disciplines and countries across the globe in a century that laid the foundation for modern academia. The articles in this volume examine the different training "instruments" and methods for text-based disciplines (history and philology), laboratory sciences (such as chemistry), theoretical sciences (mathematics, for instance), fieldwork disciplines (linguistics and paleontology), and clinical science (medicine). They consider countries or societies in Europe, North America, South and East Asia, and Latin America, and analyze the roles of the state, nationalism and internationalism that shaped the institutions and policies for research education. Some of these articles are comparative, while the others are in-depth case studies of individual disciplines in specific countries at different stages of scientific developments. The introduction and conclusion of this volume bring together the important themes that run across the article and make necessary supplements to present a synthetic picture of the global history of research education.

History of Universities XXXIV/1 contains the customary mix of learned articles which makes this publication an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. This volume offers a global history of research education in the ninteenth and twentieth centuries.

'Reorganization and Resistance' analyses the ways in which the legal professions of nine countries (England,France, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, the US, Mexico, Australia and Korea) and one continent (South America) have confronted the internal and external political, economic and social upheavals of the past twenty years. It documents how change and resistance are inextricably tied together in an oppositional tension where the greater weight shifts gradually from one to the other, even shifts backwards at times, but in the long view runs in the direction of change. The most obvious instance almost everywhere is the struggle of women in legal professions where improvement is undeniable even as resistance is varied and stiff. The book charts the way demographic shifts have changed the work of lawyers, the way that the revenue from law practice has been re-distributed, and the extent to which barriers based on race, class, religion and gender have shrunk or shifted. It describes how some professions have been forced by government or co-regulation with government to reorganize. It also documents how others have not kept pace with transformations in the economy and changes and challenges to legal education take center stage while demographic shifts and institutional reorganization are of much less importance.