Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

U.S. Sentencing Commission 1987 United States Sentencing Commission Guidelines Manual. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Sentencing Commission.

von Hirsch, Andrew 1976 Doing Justice. New York: Hill and Wang.

JOSEPH G. WEIS

professionalize to improve their status. In addition, they wanted to better their economic positions by securing occupational niches for their services (Ritzer and Walczak 1986). In the United States, at least, universities played the key role of transferring both the technical know-how and the culture of professionalism to new generations of professional aspirants (Bledstein 1976).

PROFESSIONS

The idea of a ‘‘profession’’ did not exist in ancient times. Although there were people who did what is currently denoted as professional work, these ‘‘professionals’’ often labored in dependent positions. For example, physicians in the Roman Empire were slaves in wealthy households, and architects worked as salaried public employees. Lawyers in ancient Greece were merely friends of the litigants who spoke before a gathering of their peers. Neither lawyers nor physicians received formal training (Carr-Saunders and Wilson 1937). By medieval times, the three classic professions—medicine, law, and the clergy (which included university teach- ing)—began to approximate more closely the modern conception of professions. With the development of universities, then under religious auspices, would-be professionals completed lengthy training in their chosen fields. They also began to constitute a new class of intellectuals. As society increasingly secularized, the professions emerged from under religious control and began to organize professional associations. By the eighteenth century, they had achieved independent status.

In the nineteenth century, middle-class occupations such as dentistry, architecture, and engineering began to professionalize, aspiring to the gentlemanly status of the classic, learned professions (Dingwall and Lewis 1983). ‘‘Gentlemanly’’ was the appropriate description, since the majority of professionals were men. It was not until the 1970s that women began to make significant inroads into these occupations, and even today men predominate in the status professions.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, professionalism developed in concert with the increasing division of labor and rationalization characteristic of industrializing Europe and the United States. As competitors in market economies, occupational incumbents sought to

WHICH OCCUPATIONS ARE

PROFESSIONS?

Today the term ‘‘profession’’ includes a range of occupations arrayed along a continuum of high to medium levels of prestige. At the high end of the continuum are the classic, or ‘‘status,’’ professions of medicine, law, clergy, and university teaching. Incumbents in these occupations usually receive high incomes, exercise job autonomy, and receive deference from the public and those lower in the status hierarchy. Although women have begun to gain entry into some of the professions, most professions remain predominantly male: in 1998, women’s representation among physicians, lawyers, and the clergy was 27, 28, and 12 percent, respectively. Women have made more progress moving in to college and university teaching, representing 42 percent of incumbents by 1998 (all 1998 data are from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 1999, Table 11).

Somewhat lower on the continuum are the ‘‘newer’’ professions such as dentistry, engineering, accounting, and architecture, which also command respect and relatively high salaries. Men also predominate in these occupations: 20, 11, and 18 percent of dentists, engineers, and architects, respectively, were women in 1998. Only in accounting have women made significant inroads: 58 percent of all accountants and auditors were women in 1998. This feminization is attributable largely to accounting’s dramatic occupational growth in the 1970s (Reskin and Roos 1990, pp. 40–41).

Still lower on the professional continuum are the ‘‘marginal professions’’ (e.g., pharmacy, chiropractic) and the ‘‘semiprofessions’’ (e.g., nursing, public school teaching, social work, librarianship). These occupations exhibit some characteristics of the classic professions but have not acquired full professional status because of opposition from

established professions and an inability to convince the public that they command unique expertise. These occupations are less prestigious and their incumbents are paid less than those in either the classic or the new professions. Moreover, because they are concentrated in bureaucratic settings, these professionals exercise less job autonomy than higher-status professionals. An important difference between the marginal professions and the semiprofessions is that males are in the majority in the former (although pharmacy, an occupation that has feminized rapidly in recent years, is now 44 percent female), whereas semiprofessions have long been predominantly female (in 1998 women composed 92, 75, 68, and 83 percent of nurses, public school teachers, social workers, and librarians, respectively).

Paraprofessionals work with, but as subordinates to, members of the other professions. They are generally technicians associated with various professional occupations. Paralegals, for example, work closely with lawyers, and physicians delegate certain tasks and responsibilities to physicians’ assistants. As in the semiprofessions, women tend to predominate in paraprofessional occupations. These data clearly show the sex-stratified nature of professional occupations, but these occupations are also stratified by race: in 1998, for instance, 5 percent of physicians were black, 6 percent of college and university teachers, 4 percent of lawyers, and 9 percent of clergy, notably less than their 11 percent representation in the labor force as a whole. Blacks are overrepresented, relative to their labor-force representation, in the following professions: dietitians (18 percent); respiratory therapists (12 percent); prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers (14 percent); educational and vocational counselors (13 percent); social workers (23 percent); recreation workers (16 percent); athletes (13 percent).

THE PROCESS OF PROFESSIONALIZATION

Given the stratification of the U.S. occupational structure, it is clear why workers desire to professionalize. Professionalization brings higher income, higher prestige, greater job autonomy, and higher job satisfaction. It also protects incumbents from competition. The ‘‘process of professionalization’’ posits a common sequence of development that occupations undergo. Some

scholars accept Harold Wilensky’s depiction of this process (1964). First, people begin to work full time at a specific set of tasks that will form the new occupation’s core jurisdiction. Second, those in the occupation establish a university-affiliated training program, and some incumbents undertake the responsibility for training new generations of practitioners. Third, practitioners and teachers combine to form a professional association that identifies the occupation’s core tasks and makes claims regarding skill jurisdiction. Fourth, occupational incumbents seek to protect their jurisdictional claims by political means. Professionals lobby for legal protection, in the form of licensing and certification requirements, to generate labor-mar- ket shelters that ensure their monopoly of skills. Finally, incumbents develop a formal code of ethics that embodies rules to protect clients, eliminate the unqualified, and spell out the occupation’s service ideal. As we shall see, later theorists have come to question this linear sequence of events.

APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE

PROFESSIONS

What distinguishes the professions from other occupations? Theoretical approaches in studying this question have changed over time and remain in flux. Scholars have also developed new methods to address these questions.

The Trait Approach. After World War II, the trait approach was dominant in scholarship on the professions (Freidson 1986). Scholars—mostly American academics—tried to define the professions by generating an exhaustive list of characteristics. These traits, scholars hoped, would distinguish professions from nonprofessions and higherstatus professions from those of lower status. The main method used was the case study.

Scholars carefully scrutinized particular occupations to determine how well they approximated the four major criteria, or traits, of the ideal-typical profession (Hodson and Sullivan 1990). First, professionals are experts with abstract, esoteric knowledge and skills that set them apart from others. Second, because of their unique expertise, professionals exercise autonomy on the job. Codes of ethics help to ensure autonomy from outside control by permitting professionals to police misconduct internally. Third, their esoteric knowledge

allows professionals to claim authority over their clients and subordinate occupational groups. Finally, the professions are altruistic, that is, servicerather than profit-oriented. Underlying these four traits is a fifth: the public must recognize the occupation as a profession. Regardless of an occupation’s claim of unique expertise, if the public does not view the occupation’s knowledge as abstract, it is difficult for those working in it to claim professional status and the perquisites that accompany it.

Scholars used these criteria to differentiate among the professions, most particularly in comparing the female semiprofessions to the typically male status professions. While the semiprofessions have a body of knowledge, they lack a monopoly over that knowledge. They also have a difficult time convincing the public that their skills are professional. The public is less likely to recognize their expertise (e.g., teaching children, servicing library patrons) as particularly esoteric. Semiprofessionals typically work in bureaucratic settings and, as a consequence, are subject to heteronomy, or supervision by organizational superiors and professional colleagues. Their ability to claim autonomy is limited.

The Power Approach. In the 1960s, scholars in the United States and Great Britain began to criticize the trait approach as static and ideological. Recognizing the salience of culture and social structure, power theorists also shifted to historical methods to understand the sources of professional power. They argued that occupations we view as professions do not necessarily exhibit the requisite traits, but rather have the power to convince the public that they do. Power theorists viewed the professions as monopolistic organizations intent on gaining and retaining professional control and ensuring their status in the stratification system. Eliot Freidson (1986), for example, focused on how professions establish protected labor markets for their services. Magali Sarfatti Larson (1977) argued that the professions are market organizations in the capitalist economy, explicitly seeking to dominate the market for their expertise.

For these theorists, the so-called objective characteristics of the trait approach are ideological attempts to preserve the professions’ status and privilege (Freidson 1986). Rather than being truly altruistic, professional incumbents create the myth

of service orientation to gain public goodwill, enhance their status, and minimize external control. According to this view, professionals sometimes abuse their autonomy by failing to police themselves, and incompetent doctors and lawyers fleece the public with little fear of reprisal from their peers. Finally, the professional’s authority over clients has also declined in recent years as a more educated public has become active in activities seen as the province of professionals (e.g., getting second opinions on medical recommendations and becoming more educated consumers regarding medical and legal issues).

The historical battles between physicians, on the one hand, and pharmacists and chiropractors on the other, illustrate how an established profession exercises power against competing occupations (Starr 1982). When the pharmacist’s traditional task of compounding drugs shifted to pharmaceutical companies, they lost their diagnostic expertise (and hence monopoly over their knowledge). With respect to chiropractors, the American Medical Association restricted access through licensing laws or blocked reimbursement from private insurance companies. As a consequence, pharmacy and chiropractic have yet to become fully professional.

What enables professions to wield power? Theorists point to the occupational characteristics indeterminancy and uncertainty (Ritzer and Walczak 1986). The professions that have achieved and maintained power are those whose tasks cannot be broken down or otherwise routinized (indeterminancy). Similarly, those that deal with areas of uncertainty are also likely to preserve their power. As Wilensky (1964) described it, professional knowledge involves a ‘‘tacit’’ dimension, in Polanyi’s (1967) terminology. Their lengthy training and years of practical application ensure that physicians ‘‘know’’ what treatments to use for which symptoms. Similarly, lawyers ‘‘know’’ what legal strategies work best and college professors ‘‘know’’ what instructional strategies are most effective in enhancing student learning. Reading a textbook or consulting computerized data bases is not equivalent to tacit knowledge. This kind of knowledge—expertise refined by years of experi- ence—is not easily routinized. Physicians and lawyers also deal with areas of high uncertainty for their clients, the former with physical health and the latter with legal affairs. Clients need these

professionals to translate medical and legal jargon into everyday language they can more readily understand.

The System of Professions. Andrew Abbott’s (1988, 1995) theory of professions critiqued the notion that professions undergo a common process of development. Employing historical and comparative methods, Abbott provided a wealth of evidence that the history of the professions is much more complicated than that represented in a linear process of professionalization. Rather than a history of professions that established systems of control (e.g., schools, professional associations, licensing and certification), Abbott’s account is of ongoing interprofessional competitions, squabbles over jurisdictions, and professional births and deaths.

Abbott contended that professions make up an interdependent ‘‘system of professions.’’ Understanding modern professions entails articulating their histories of conflict with other professions. Comprehending the realities of modern medicine, for example, depends more on investigating its historical conflicts with closely related professions such as psychiatry and chiropractic than on the particulars of medieval or nineteenthcentury medicine.

Recognizing the interdependence of professions is important because it clarifies that professions emerge, grow, change, and die within the historical context of competition with other professions. This competition takes the form of jurisdictional disputes over the control of abstract knowledge. Professionals can use their abstract knowledge to define a core set of tasks (their jurisdiction), defend that jurisdiction from others, or appropriate the tasks of others. Interprofessional boundary wars reflect professions’ attempts to ‘‘enclose’’ jurisdictional tasks within the boundaries of their profession’s sphere of influence (Abbott 1995, p. 553; see also Witz 1992). One recent example of such a jurisdictional dispute was pediatric medicine’s partially successful attempt to expand their sphere of influence to include children’s psychosocial disorders (Halpern 1990). Whether professions succeed or fail in such jurisdictional disputes, any changes reverberate throughout the system. The professions reequilibrate, with some occupations accepting a subordinate or advisory role, some agreeing to split jurisdictions or clients, and others exiting the professions altogether. To

adequately theorize and model jurisdictional disputes, Abbott (1993, p. 205) advocated a multilevel analysis that links micro-level information on careers, to meso-level data on the network structure of careers and jobs, to the macro-level work and occupational structures.

SEX DIFFERENCES IN THE PROFESSIONS

In 1998, women composed 46 percent of the employed labor force and 53 percent of professionals, suggesting that women do quite well in the professions. However, a closer look reveals a different story. As noted, women are heavily concentrated in the semiprofessions (as nurses, public school teachers, social workers, and librarians) and men in the higher-status professions (as physicians, lawyers, and engineers). Incumbents in the former earn less and exercise less autonomy than in the latter. As in the occupational structure as a whole, the professions are highly segregated by sex.

Even within the higher-prestige professions, women work in different, lower-paying, and less prestigious jobs than men. Women lawyers, for example, work in government jobs, in research rather than litigation, and in certain specialties such as trust and estates; women physicians are more likely than men to specialize in pediatrics and to work in health maintenance organizations (HMOs); female clergy specialize in music or education (Reskin and Phipps 1988; see also Tang and Smith 1996).

Part of the reason for this differential job distribution by sex has to do with a characteristic unique to the professions. The high level of uncertainty inherent in prestigious professional jobs means that employers are careful to choose recruits who ‘‘fit in’’ with those already on the job. Thus, as Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1977) suggested, employers tend to recruit people much like themselves, a process she calls ‘‘homosocial reproduction.’’ The predominance of males in the status professions thus helps to reproduce sex segregation.

Other factors reducing women’s access to highstatus professions are entrance restrictions such as certification and licensing. Physicians, for example, consolidated their control over medical jurisdictions by successfully pressing for legislation to outlaw midwives and prohibit the licensing of those trained at ‘‘irregular’’ schools, activities that

disproportionately affected women. In 1872, the Supreme Court restricted women’s ability to practice law, arguing that ‘‘the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life’’ (Reskin and Phipps 1988, p. 192). Male professionals were thus able to establish labor-market shelters to protect themselves from competition from women as well as other ‘‘undesirables.’’

Since 1970, women have gained greater entry into some of the professions, including occupations such as medicine, law, and pharmacy. Indications are, however, that internal differentiation within the professions perpetuates job segregation by sex (Reskin and Roos 1990). For example, Polly Phipps (1990) found that women’s representation in pharmacy nearly tripled (from 12 to 32 percent) between 1970 and 1988, and has continued to increase since then, reaching 44 percent by 1998. However, women pharmacists concentrate in the lower-paying hospital sector, while men predominate in the higher-paying retail sector. Similar ghettoization exists in other professions that are admitting more women (see, for example, Reskin [1990] on book editors; Donato [1990] on public relations specialists; Roos and Jones [1993] on academic sociologists; and Roos and Manley [1996] on human resource managers and professionals).

THE CHANGING PROFESSIONS

Some view the future of the professions as bleak, predicting that ongoing proletarianization or deprofessionalization will eliminate the professions’ unique traits. The proletarianization thesis argues that an increasing division of labor and a bureaucratization within the professions are routinizing knowledge and transferring authority from professionals to organizational superiors. The deprofessionalization thesis documents declines in the professions’ monopolistic control over their knowledge, their exercise of autonomy on the job, their ability to protect their jurisdiction from encroachments, and the public’s deference to professional authority (Ritzer and Walczak 1986).

Some occupations, of course, have lost some of their professional status. As noted, as pharmaceutical companies increasingly absorbed the compounding of drugs, and as chains replaced independent pharmacies, pharmacists lost some of

their autonomy and monopoly of their knowledge to physicians. Taking a broad view of the professions, however, Freidson (1984; 1994, p. 9) argued that professionalism has been ‘‘reborn’’ in a hierarchical form in which bureaucratization and professionalization are often quite compatible. Working in organizations, he argued, has been the norm for many professions from their inception, with engineers the most obvious example. In addition, organizations that employ professionals tend to diverge enough from the ideal-typical bureaucracy to protect professional privilege. For example, professionals in organizations often exercise a lot of autonomy, working under senior members of their own profession rather than nonprofessional managers. Freidson thus portrayed most organizations as working to accommodate professionals, and operating under an ‘‘occupational principle’’ of authority, as opposed to an ‘‘administrative principle’’ of organizing and controlling work (1994, p. 61). Wallace (1995) also described how some bureaucratic work systems—specifically a ‘‘corporatist’’ model of control—can be quite compatible with professionals’ self interests.

Like Freidson and Abbott, Brint (1994) viewed the professions as social forms that evolve historically in conjunction with other occupations and work organizations. Rather than look to professions interacting through jurisdictional disputes, however, Brint contextualized changes in the professions within the workplace itself, in the occupationally and organizationally based ties professionals have, and the markets in which they work (see also Leicht and Fennell 1997). He described the ascendance of a new, organizationally based pro- fession—expert professions—that relaxes traditional assumptions about professional work. Pursuing profits, closer interconnections with business, and lesser attention to larger public interests, are all hallmarks of ‘‘expert professionalism’’ (Brint 1994, p. 8), which Brint juxtaposed with ‘‘social trustee professionalism,’’ the traditional conception of professions as the trustees of socially important knowledge (p. 4). In Brint’s view, the professional class has splintered into highly skilled experts in resource-rich organizations as opposed to professionals with less marketable skills in resource-poor organizations, especially in the public and nonprofit sectors (p. 11). These differing organizational locations have predictable consequences for incumbents’ political and social views.

Even with such changes, Freidson (1984, 1994) found no evidence that the prestige of the professions as a whole has declined. Nor did he find that public trust in professionals has deteriorated relative to other American institutions. Moreover, the professions’ continuing ability to erect labor-mar- ket barriers to competition is important evidence of their enduring power. Professionals today remain strong enough to exert their will against others lower in the occupational hierarchy. Professional privilege remains intact in the American occupational structure.

As the professions change, theorizing must evolve as well. Some have begun to call for a broader, synthetic theory of occupations, one that situates the professions in a comparative way within the larger occupational structure (e.g., Abbott 1993; Freidson 1994). Central to such a broader theory is a method that sets occupations not only in their historical, comparative contexts, but also in the organizational and market context in which occupational incumbents work (e.g., Brint 1994). Freidson (1994, p. 21) has argued for moving beyond a theory that defines professions by fiat, to one that recognizes the professional aspirations of a variety of other nonprofessional occupations. In Freidson’s terminology, how do ordinary occupational incumbents invoke their day-to-day work activities so as to claim professional status, regardless of whether the larger public would recognize them as professionals? Such a conceptualization opens up the possibility that other occupations can organize in their own self-interest to generate their own ‘‘professional projects.’’ Claiming a unique expertise or specialized knowledge, developing professional associations, and convincing the state that certification is appropriate are first steps toward claiming professional status. Ultimately, the true test of professional status will be to convince others that the expertise one has entitles one to professional privilege, and to the right to establish labor market shelters. Only then will professional status and earnings rise to accompany claims of professional privilege.

REFERENCES

Abbott, Andrew 1988 The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

——— 1993 ‘‘The Sociology of Work and Occupations.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 19:187–209.

——— 1995 ‘‘Boundaries of Social Work or Social Work of Boundaries.’’ Social Service Review 4:545–562.

Bledstein, Burton J. 1976 The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. New York: W. W. Norton.

Brint, Steven 1994 In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Carr-Saunders, A. M., and P. A. Wilson 1937 ‘‘Professions.’’ In Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson, eds., Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.

Dingwall, Robert, and Philip Lewis 1983 The Sociology of

the Professions: Lawyers, Doctors and Others. London:

Macmillan.

Donato, Katharine M. 1990 ‘‘Keepers of the Corporate Image: Women in Public Relations.’’ In Barbara F. Reskin and Patricia A. Roos, eds., Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Inroads into Male Occupations. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press.

Freidson, Eliot 1984 ‘‘The Changing Nature of Professional Control.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 10:1–20.

———1986 Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———1994 Professionalism Reborn: Theory, Prophecy, and Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Halpern, Sydney 1990 ‘‘Medicalization as Professional Process: Postwar Trends in Pediatrics.’’ Journal of Health and Social Behavior 31:28–42.

Hodson, Randy, and Teresa A. Sullivan 1990 The Social Organization of Work. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss 1977 Men and Women of the Corporation. New York: Harper and Row.

Larson, Magali Sarfatti 1977 The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Leicht, Kevin T., and Mary L. Fennell 1997 ‘‘The Changing Organizational Context of Professional Work.’’

Annual Review of Sociology 23:215–231.

Phipps, Polly A. 1990 ‘‘Industrial and Occupational Change in Pharmacy: Prescription for Feminization.’’ In Barbara F. Reskin and Patricia A. Roos, eds., Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Inroads into Male Occupations. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press.

Polanyi, Michael 1967 The Tacit Dimension. Garden City,

N.Y.: Anchor.

Reskin, Barbara F. 1990 ‘‘Culture, Commerce, and Gender: The Feminization of Book Editing.’’ In Barbara F. Reskin and Patricia A. Roos, eds, Job Queues, Gender

Queues: Explaining Women’s Inroads into Male Occupations. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press.

———, and Polly A. Phipps 1988 ‘‘Women in MaleDominated Professional and Managerial Occupations.’’ In Ann H. Stromberg and Shirley Harkess, eds., Women Working. Theories and Facts in Perspective. Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield.

Reskin, Barbara F., and Patricia A. Roos 1990 Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Inroads into Male Occupations. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press.

Ritzer, George, and David Walczak 1986 Working. Conflict and Change, 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Pren- tice-Hall.

Roos, Patricia A., and Katharine Jones 1993 ‘‘Shifting Gender Boundaries: Women’s Inroads into Academic Sociology.’’ Work and Occupations 20:395–428.

Roos, Patricia A., and Joan E. Manley 1996 ‘‘Staffing Personnel: Feminization and Change in Human Resource Management.’’ Sociological Focus 29:245–261.

Starr, Paul 1982 The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry. New York: Basic.

Tang, Joyce, and Earl Smith (eds.) 1996 Women and Minorities in American Professions. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 1999 Employment and Earnings, vol. 46. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Wallace, Jean E. 1995 ‘‘Corporatist Control and Organizational Commitment among Professions: the Case of Lawyers Working in Law Firms.’’ Social Forces 73:811–839.

Wilensky, Harold L. 1964 ‘‘The Professionalization of Everyone?’’ American Journal of Sociology 70:137–158.

Witz, Anne 1992 Professions and Patriarchy. New York:

Routledge.

PATRICIA A. ROOS

PROSTITUTION

See Sexual Behavior Patterns; Legislation of Morality; Sexual Violence and Exploitation.

PROTEST MOVEMENTS

Protest movements have been of high interest to sociological research since the inception of the

discipline in the mid-nineteenth century, during the periods of great industrial and urban development in Europe and North America. In the context of massive changes in the economic structure and mass rural-to-urban and cross-national migration, a variety of protest movements developed. They caught the attention of Comte, Le Bon, Weber, and other early sociological analysts. In the United States, the first widely used introductory sociology textbook, developed by Chicago School sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess in the 1920s, was organized around the concepts of collective behavior. Protest movements occupied a substantive part of the text.

Sociologists’ interest in protest movements reflects the high interest of many who are not sociologists and are not research oriented. Such movements have the potential of affecting lives in substantial ways. This is particularly so when a protest touches on wide public concerns. In American society, the recognition of the potential impact of protest movements is encompassed within the framework of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances.

The language of the First Amendment, including the right to ‘‘peaceably’’ protest, is in recognition that protest movements can turn violent. Rebellion on taxes and other violent protest in the 1780s had strongly influenced the desire of those at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to expand democratic public expression while outlawing violent means of bringing about protest movement changes. The language of the First Amendment reflects the potential power of protest ideas. Any consideration of protest movements needs to include the effects of those, like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in the case of the amendment language, whose articulated ideas about grievances provide a key element in active protest emergence.

While most protest movements in the United States and in other democratically based societies have been mostly peaceful, there is a stream of protests which have not been peaceful. There are many examples of protest movements with no or little violence, including the multiple women’s protests for more rights and opportunities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the

food and drug protection movement in the early twentieth century; the earlyand late-twentieth century environmental protest movements for cleaner air, water, and protection of endangered species and open spaces; and the protest marches of 1998 in many communities and in Washington, D.C., which resulted in new record public expenditures for cancer research at a time of budget cutbacks in most government programs. In contrast, examples of protest movements that generated periodic violence include the labor movement protests to nonresponsive corporations and legislatures from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, the racialand ethnic-led civil rights protest since the mid-twentieth century, and the anti–Vietnam War protest movement of the late 1960s and the early 1970s.

As not all protest movements succeed, or may succeed at a frustratingly slow pace for participants, protest activists in these protests went beyond democratically legitimate means of protest. When that occurs generally, the basis exists for violent protest episodes. Protest movements may also generate violence in opposition to a protest movement from those whose perceived vested interests and way of life are threatened. Such violence may occur to intimidate people and prevent them from engaging in protests, one clear aim of the hundreds of lynchings of black citizens in the first half of the twentieth century. Violence may occur in the context of a counterprotest movement to reverse a successful movement, as in the case of the bombings and physician killings at abortion clinics following the successful establishment of the legal right of women to seek and have an abortion.

Whether violent or nonviolent, protest movements have the potential of being an interim form of collective challenge to some aspect of the social status quo. The protest continuum ranges from localized groups and crowds that organize around specific and short-term delimited grievances to mass protest movements about social conditions and perceived injustices. These mass protests are designed to generate comprehensive and fundamental changes in a society and sometimes across societies. More so than localized acting crowds and less so than systemic social movements, protest movements encompass mass behavior that extends beyond a localized situation, and they have the potential of generating social movements

when a variety of conducive conditions exists (Gusfield 1968; Smelser 1962; Tilly 1978).

The twentieth century has been characterized by a wide variety of protest movements. In the United States, industrial protests were common for the first third of the century, as were antiimmigration protests. The suffragette protest movement early in the century was a precursor to the women’s movement for equal treatment and opportunity in the last third of the century. The civil rights movement, led by blacks in the 1950s and 1960s, precipitated countermovements—a common characteristic of protest movements—includ- ing the White Citizen’s Council protests and the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan. Poor people in Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other Latin American countries have protested the privileges of an elite economic class as vestiges of an unproductive and rigid class colonial structure. Such protest movements are evident globally, with protest occurrences in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

A common thread through the wide variety of protest movements is their political nature. In various ways governmental authority is challenged, changed, supported, or resisted in specific protest movements. To advance their prospects for success, protest movement leaders often engage in coalition politics with more powerful individuals and groups who, for their own interests and values, support the challenge raised by the movement. When protest movements succeed in generating sufficient public support to secure all or most of their goals, governments may offer policy legitimization of the movement as a means of adapting to, coopting, or modifying a movement’s challenge to the state of premovement affairs.

Such political legitimation has taken a variety of forms. The labor protest movements culminated in the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which legitimized labor-management collective bargaining and negotiated agreements. The suffragette movement resulted in passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing that the right to vote in the United States could not be denied or abridged on account of sex. The civil rights movement attained support with passage of the comprehensive Civil Rights Act in 1964 and then the Economic Opportunity Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, both in 1965. All these system-modifying acts,

which affect the lives of millions in American society, have continued in effect during relatively high and low periods of public support. This gives evidence of the long-term societal legitimation of these acts, which grew out of protest movements.

Success of these and other movements is often tempered by countermovements, participants in which perceive their relative positions and interests to be threatened. For instance, the women’s movement experienced a series of challenges from religious groups, often fundamentalist, that adhered to a male-dominated patriarchy. As a consequence, women’s progress was slowed in winning various forms of equal treatment and opportunity in educational, economic, political, and social areas of life, and in the 1970s and the 1980s Congress failed to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, which was supported by the women’s movement.

More generally, after passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, a series of protest movements within the Democratic and, more extensively, the Republican parties resulted in growing administrative, legislative, and judicial resistance to equality in educational, occupational, and housing opportunities. The countermovement result has been a reentrenchment of a long-estab- lished economic structure of racism and low-in- come class rigidity that functions independently of personalized racist feelings and beliefs (Wilson 1987). A reflection of such countermovement pressure is the growth in perception among white males that affirmative action educational and occupational policies directed toward racial and ethnic minorities and women constitute a form of reverse, or affirmative, discrimination (Glazer 1989).

Countermovements have generated their own counterprotest movements. This countermovement variation of Hegelian dialectic does not result in a return to whatever constituted premovement normalcy. In conventional political terms the results are more conservative, reactionary, liberal, or radical than what existed before the protest movement. When protests and counterprotests result in social change, such change generally affects the participants in a specific protest movement as well as established authorities in ways often not fully anticipated. While a predominant orientation may exist among protest activists and another among established authorities, in complex, mass modern

societies, a range of political orientations is usually contending among protestors and their supporters and among established authorities and their supporters, against whom the protest is directed.

The U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s can be viewed in historical terms, if not contemporary terms, as a primarily conservative movement. The predominant, although not allencompassing, aim of activists and organizations was to enable blacks and other minorities to break into the democratically value-based, but not fully practiced, political and economic system. Most protest leaders and participants did not aim to break the established system. In contrast, the late 1980s and early 1990s liberal to radical protest movements in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and other eastern European countries did have as their goal the breakdown of the system of exclusive authoritarian political and economic domination.

In the United States, protest ideologies are largely reminiscent of established, liberal, democratic political ideals. This is evidenced in the way many protest groups adopt language from the Declaration of Independence to advance their aims. For example, the Black Panthers, popularly perceived as a radical group, adopted a statement of purpose that held, ‘‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all black and white [sic] men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.’’ Similarly, the National Organization for Women inserted into its declaration of purposes the wording that ‘‘men and women’’ are created equal.

Protest movements attain mixed and sometimes changed results. These results occur because of institutional inertia, in which certain things have been done certain ways over a long period of time, and because of countermovements within institutional centers such as schools; businesses; and local, state, and national government offices. In the United States, reactions to the civil rights movement have resulted in private and public attitudes and behavior that have combined to support inclusion of some minority members while disadvantaging more severely the lowest-income racial and ethnic minorities (Wilson 1987). The result is that the countermovement resistance to educational, economic, and political advances for minority status groups has adversely affected the poorest racial and ethnic minority members. At

the same time, census bureau reports document a growing number and proportion of blacks, women, and other minority group members moving into educational institutions, occupational settings, and political positions from which they were formerly excluded de jure or de facto.

Examples from history and other cultures demonstrate the mixed potential and results of protest movements. The German Nazi protest movement in the 1920s illustrated that a movement could be radical and reactionary, in that case toward further destabilization of the Weimar Republic’s democratic government, which was perceived as being decreasingly effective and legitimate by growing sectors of the German public (Shirer 1960). After the Nazis succeeded in countering various democratic and communist protest movements, Germany saw a more comprehensive institutionalization of Nazi ideological and authoritarian control during the 1930s. An historic, more recent example is the 1989 Chinese student democratic movement in Tianenmen Square that resulted in a govern- ment-sponsored countermovement that physically shattered the student protest and created a system of political, economic, and educational controls that were more comprehensively rigid than those that existed before the protest movement. Yet, the underlying educational, economic, and political forces that generated the Chinese student activists continued to affect the dynamics of Chinese society, with the potential for further protest activation.

In these and other protest movements, there is a wide range of participants and of protest methods employed. Along with the nature of the social context and historical influences, the characteristics of protest participants and the methods they employ are consequential and have been central concerns of research on such movements.

PROTEST PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS

OF PROTEST

If protest participants could alleviate their grievances or sense of injustice individually, there would be no likely motivation for them to become active in a protest movement. Protest participants thus have two central characteristics: (1) they have insufficient influence to gain a desired change in their circumstances, and (2) they seek active association with relatively like-minded persons to gain relief from their aggrieved state.

These two characteristics can be seen among protest participants over time and in different locales. In the 1960s civil rights movements in the United States, leading activists—including blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and women—ex- pressed a strong sense of unequal treatment and opportunity while associating with and supporting activists to achieve equal opportunities in schools, jobs, elected offices, and other social settings. College students, the most active participants in the civil rights movement, could not generally be characterized in these minority status terms. Yet, they were not yet an established part of the economic and political order being challenged and were in a position to be critical of that order (Lipset 1971). Other participant supporters, such as labor unions, selected corporate leaders, and religiously motivated persons, often saw protestrelated change needed in terms of their own longterm interests and worked either to help the civil rights movement succeed or to preempt or coopt it (Gamson 1990, pp. 28–31). The broad political support base for the comprehensive 1964 Civil Rights Act had all these protest movement participant elements.

The individuals who are most likely to initiate and support a protest movement tend to be those with long-developed grievances within a society. A case in point is Solidarity, the labor group that precipitated the successful 1980s protest movement against communist rule in Poland and that helped precipitate other successful eastern European protest movements. The initial work stoppage, instrumental in offering a political challenge to Polish and Soviet authority, occurred at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, a center of Cassubian ethnic residence. For generations Cassubians have held a minority status in Polish society (Lorentz 1935). As the protest movement proceeded to secure broad-based support among Polish citizens, it was no accident that Cassubians, who have experienced prejudice and discrimination beyond communist rule in Poland, would be at the forefront. It is not surprising that Solidarity was led by a Cassub, Lech Walesa. It is also noteworthy that the protest movement received strong support from another Cassub, Pope John Paul II, whose original name of Karol Wojtyla ends with a Cassubian ‘‘a’’ rather than the more typical Polish ‘‘ski.’’

In the United States, the civil rights movement was manifestly initiated and led by blacks. Jews,