4 - From Bourgeois to Professional

Summary

Scholars have often considered salary-earning professionals as workers, since they did not own the means of production and, from the 1920s onwards, were subject to increasingly ‘scientific’ management. Professionals were not always salary earners, however. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, professionals tended to own small businesses. Over the twentieth century, professionals moved into ever-larger enterprises, typically becoming salaried employees. Early professional businesses included individual medical and accountancy practices, small legal partnerships, independent local newspapers, and engineering consultancies. Women, too, owned small schools and nursing homes or home-based private hospitals where they cared for the sick, or they worked on their own account. The transformation of the professional class from small, bourgeois business owners to a large salaried workforce has been poorly documented and theorized. This chapter shows the trajectory of professional work towards ever-larger, even industrializing, institutions. I argue that, even when salaried, the professional class retained the model of moral capitalization they had built into their original bourgeois businesses. They supported the expansion of the enterprises in which they worked, even their industrialization, because it expanded their influence, extending virtue across the Anglo world.