THE PROFESSION OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS
Strong and weak professions
‘Strong’ professions (for example medicine, law) establish their own regulatory bodies which control entry. ‘Weak’ professions (such as applied linguistics) lack such sanctions. Hence the importance of the ‘ethical milieu’. But weak professions can establish a professional association (with regularized membership, an office, officers, publications and so on); to become ‘strong’ professions they also need to reach agreement on recognized qualifications licensing members to practice as professionals, control (through licensing) on entry to the profession and therefore on standards and behavior. This control is difficult to achieve and probably requires legal support. Unlike medicine or law (or indeed psychology) there is no restriction on who can practice as an applied linguist. However, in the absence of external sanctions informal control can be exercised through the ‘ethical milieu’. Through formalized training programs leading to degrees and certificates, through internal discussion, conferences such as the triennial AILA Congress and annual meetings of the national associations, through regular publications of Applied Linguistics and the other general and specialized journals in the field, through agreement, as far as possible, on what is required to become a professional applied linguist.
Weak professions may compensate themselves for their lack of sanctions by condemning the power exercised by traditional professions. This is the point made by Marshall, who maintains there is an ideological aspect to professionalism:
Recent sociological work has tended to view professionalization as the establishment of effective interest group control over clients, with socially constructed problems as a means of exercising ‘power’ in society. This approach treats professional ethics as an ideology, rather than an orientation necessarily adhered to or meaningful in practice. Entry and knowledge controls function as a form of status exclusion from privileged and remunerative employment. In this respect, professional organizations make an interesting comparison with trade unions, for although formal professional ethics preclude collective bargaining and industrial conflict, in practice many associations have found themselves becoming more and more unionate, whilst many unions practice quasi-professional job-entry control.
(1994: 419)
