Am Soc (2010) 41:174189 DOI 10.

1007/s12108-010-9094-x

Varieties of Ignorance
Andrew Abbott

Published online: 20 April 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

Abstract This paper considers three types and levels of ignorance about the professions: expert, amateur, and professional. The empirical data comprise my own book about the professions, the Wikipedia article on that subject, and the 105 papers that cited my book in 2008. In these three I separate ignorance of facts, of literatures, and of skills, characterizing each type of ignorance by its mix of the three. Amateur ignorance is mostly of skills, and professional ignorance mostly ignorance of collateral literatures. Expert ignorance reflects the use of theory as a mnemonic device and so is particularly insidious. Keywords Ignorance . Knowledge . Citation . Professions In his treatise On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others, Francesco Petrarca answered four young detractors who had agreed, one tipsy evening, that the poet was a fine old man, but a poor scholar. On the one hand, he confessed his own ignorance, but with flashing expertise. On the other, he praised his opponents, but for pusillanimity rather than virtue. It was a double chiasmus. Ignorance is an enduring subject, for Petrarca was followed by Rabelais, Erasmus, and many others, who like him looked back to Juvenal and Horace, Lucian and Menippus. And it has not gone uninvestigated in sociology, as articles by Moore and Tumin (1949), Schneider (1962), Merton (1987) Stocking (1998), Gross (2007), and Ungar (2008) suggest. (There are also some papers in the philosophy of social scienceSmithson 1985, 1993). But the rarity of these articles suggests a certain sociological ignorance of ignorance. So I here undertake a small empirical analysis of ignorance in a particular area, hoping thereby to discover what we might call the varieties of ignorance. In so doing, I take an empirical and inductive approach rather than the theoretical and to some extent deductive one that characterizes these earlier works. But the empirical approach is also justified because of the changing nature of ignorance. After all, in this electronic age we can be ignorant faster than ever before, about more things and in more settings. Perhaps we should choose our mode of ignorance carefully. I approach the varieties of ignorance by looking at three sets of writings about a topic on which my colleagues think me to be an expert: the professions. In the late 1980s,
A. Abbott (*) Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th St., Chicago, IL 60637, USA e-mail: a-abbott@uchicago.edu

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I published a large book on this subject, The System of Professions. With Magali Larsons The Rise of Professionalism (1977) and Eliot Freidsons Profession of Medicine (1970), this book shares the honor of having been cited by colleagues more than a thousand times since publication. Indeed, in an eighteen-year retrospective review, one writer remarked that the book had essentially shut down a vibrant academic field.... anyone seeking to study the professions after reading it had difficulty imagining they could say anything new that [Abbotts] book had not already covered (McKenna 2006:141). But of course other people do in fact know many things about the professions that I do not. The millions of professionals in the world know many such things. Colleagues writing about particular professions know many such things. Thus, one might better put the whole thing the other way around and say that rather than being an expert, I am simply less ignorant about professions than most others. Perhaps I know 3% of what should be known about them, while my average colleague knows 2%, and the average intelligent person 1%. I shall argue however that the difference lies not in the amount of this ignorance, but in its kind. I uncover these kinds of ignorance by looking at the three levels of knowledge of professions that I have just mentioned. I look first at the basic argument of my supposedly expert book. To seek the average intelligent person, I then turn to Wikipedia, where the professions page does not list my book in its bibliography nor show any other awareness of it. Finally, to find the views of colleagues, I turn to those scholarly papers that cited my book in 2008, analyzing their comprehension of its arguments and the use they make of them. From this threefold analysis I turn back to the introductory question of kinds of ignorance and relate my analysis to the literature on ignorance.

A System of Professions My book asserts that one cannot properly write histories of individual professions, because what happens to any one profession is so shaped by what happens to those around it that an internal history must either reorganize itself around this environing determination or misattribute changes to internal causes. Previous histories of professions evaded this constraint by ignoring what really matters about professions the work they doand focusing on structural similarities (licensing, ethics codes, and so on); these last are subject to internal determination precisely because they dont really matter. Professions exist, in the books view, because they are groups that manage to acquire controljurisdictionof an area of work. The structural shape they take is determined by the need for jurisdictional control, not vice versa. This link of jurisdiction is two-fold. In the first instance it is cultural. By this I mean that the would-be profession must constitute its area of work. The problems handled by professionshealth, disputes, monies, designs, unhappiness, and so on do not have any inherent symbolic shape. The would-be professions must culturally constitute them: fatness must be turned into the disease of obesity, drabness into the architectural challenge of style, and so on. Moreover, the professions must defend those constitutions against competing constitutions of them by other would-be professions. Indeed, it is by competing in this wayvia the cultural reconstitution of human problemsthat an occupation identifies itself as a profession. There is no list of structural qualities or given functions that defines a profession. Rather, a profession

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is any occupation that competes for a work via this kind of cultural activity. Note too that the professions cultural shaping of problems is not merely a matter of cognition, of diagnosis. A profession must also create treatments to resolve the problem as well as an inference system that links diagnosis and treatment. Any or all of these is subject to competition by environing occupations. The second aspect of jurisdiction is structural. In order to claim legitimate control of the problem that it has constituted and defended against competitors, the would-be profession must create a social structure that guarantees its efficacy before crucial audiences: other workers in the workplace, the public at large, and the legal system or state. This structure most often includes the things usually listed as traits of professionslicensing, schooling, ethics codes, and so on. But these can easily be counterfeited by occupations that do not compete via cultural construction of problems, and are often ignored by occupations that do so compete. Moreover, professions can come to a variety of settlements with competing occupations: dominance hierarchies, split jurisdictions, client differentiation, and so on. The consequence of the jurisdictional problem, across many occupations, is that each profession is in perpetual conflict with others, jostling and shoving in a complex division of labor. Various shocks from outside this ecology of conflict can reshape its conditions. Technological or demographic events can reshape its social structuring or even the array of problems subject to jurisdictional claims. Intellectual changes can outmode or transform the apparatus of cultural construction. Shifting ideologies can dramatically change the power of given types of constructions (the rise of medicalization, for example). The history of professions, in fact, is the history of this jostling, of the shocks that transform the system, and of the whole arenas of work that are being steadily reconstructed. The book does allow that forces internal to professions play a part. But the part they play is determined completely by the ecological conditions. That nineteenth century British solicitors had a highly formal system of clerkship may have been very professional, but it was a competitive disaster when the new business world of the late nineteenth century multiplied legal work an hundredfold. There werent enough solicitors to do the work, and businessmen found other ways of solving disputes. Sometimes, being less professional is better. In summary, the book focuses on the division of expert labor. The history of individual professions is dominated by this broader ecological history of the system of professions. We should be writing histories of arenas or zones in that ecology, not of individual professions and occupations. The latter are not where causality lives. Given that I will be talking a good deal about people who have missed this argument, it is important to note that it is not hidden or implicit. It is summarized at several places in the text. It is implicit in the chapter architecture of the book. It is evident even in the books curious title, which led some incautious writers to assume the book to be an essay in functionalism.

Professions in Wikipedia This then is the actual argument of the book thought by the scholarly literature to be one of the two or three dominant views of professions. To be more precise, this is

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what I its author think my book says. What then do we read when we turn to Wikipedias article on professions (as of 10 December 2009)? I start with the sources. The foonote references in the article, 28 of them, include only one that cites a standard work on the sociology of professions: Terence Johnsons short and quite important 1972 book, Professions and Power, which is footnoted to support the (obvious) sentence All professions have power but none of whose detailed analysis is used (Johnson set out three types of occupational control, of which professionalism is one). The main source (7 of 28 footnotes) for this article is a book on Accounting and Society (Perks 1993) unavailable in my universitys 8.5 million volume collection, written by an accountant and published in a publishers series of books on accounting. (It is, in effect, a textbook for undergraduate accounting majors.) More broadly, the articles reference list contains no book published by a university press. It contains only two references to refereed journals (Accounting Historians Journal and Theoretical Medicine). It contains references to some newspaper articles (The Independent, The Guardian), some professional association pamphlets (Royal College of Pathologists, American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, American Bar Assocation), two scholars essays posted on the internet, and two other books beside those already mentioned, both of them perfectly respectable but minor books on aspects of medical monopoly. After this reference list is added a bibliography of five uncited works, one by Eliot Freidson (Professional Powers), one by David Sugarman and my student Yves Dezalay (Professional Competition and Professional Power), and three other books also from known academic presses (Routledge and Transaction). There is no sign that these bookstwo of which I know quite wellhave influenced the article. This is the reference list and bibliography that would be compiled by an advanced undergraduate (in accounting) who had been asked to write a paper on professions more generally. It shows no real knowledge of scholarly studies of professions. It has no idea of the relative quality of different kinds of sources. It doesnt know that Terence Johnsons book is a sociological and theoretical reflection on the professions and that using it parallel with articles from the Guardian or books by accounting professors on their own profession is like mixing apples, tuna fish, and water biscuits. Like most undergraduate papers, the article itself is an earnest attempt to get beyond what its author rightly suspects to be an unsophisticatedeven naiveview of professions, and to do this by finding some relevant abstractions. The author (like all Wikipedia articles, this one has many edits, but there is a clear main author) behaves as a good Aristotelian. He is connected with accounting, but understands that there are other professions. So he looks for the qualities of the genus of which accounting is a species. He wants of course to be sure that accounting passes muster as a profession, and so is unwilling to entertain a conception of professions that excludes accounting, but is also unwilling to entertain so broad a conception that professions might include, say, bookkeepers. This is of course a program for conceptualization that he shares not only with his chief source (Perks 1993), but also with virtually all members of the professions themselves, for whom defining professions is about conferring status, and for whom, in consequence, the criterion of

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a theory is that its definition of profession-ness include their own professions while excluding a satisfactory number of others. The article is thus a classic exposition of what has in the scholarly literature come to be called the traits view of profession: a profession is any occupation that has a certain set of traits: schools, licenses, exams, ethics codes, etc. Thus, the article quotes Sydney and Beatrice Webb in 1917 (as a footnote says), who say that a profession is a vocation founded upon specialised educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain. The traits in this case are special education, counsel, fee for service, and lack of business interest. So much for contemporary American lawyers with their contingent fees, for past British barristers with their dinners at the Inns of Court, and for professional service corporations of all kinds; by this definition, none of these are professionals! But of course a concept of professions that doesnt apply to American lawyers is useless. And it turns out that any traits definition has this or a similar problem, as decades of research have shown. That is why although the traits view dominated the scholarly literature on professions in the 1950s and 1960s, it was deemed beside the point by Freidson in 1970, was shown to be historically contingent by Larson in 1977, and was completely rejected by myself in 1988. This problem recurs throughout the Wikipedia article: it rediscovers (by thoughtful but amateur reflection) views shown decades ago to be erroneous or useless by specialists in the social science of professions. Thus, we also get the familiar argument that there were three classic professions, even though this argument is simply a present survival of the historical fact that Divinity, Medicine, and Law were the three non-arts faculties of the medieval universities. (Medieval healers, lawyers, and even clerics often came from outside these faculties, and one can make a good case that the military took modern professional form well before healers.) We also get the celebrated notion that professionalization happens in a certain order (roughly speaking: schools, then licenses, then exams, then ethics codes). This notion was first investigated by Harold Wilensky (1964, uncited in the Wikipedia article), and was demolished (on the ground that it arose from a measurement error) by myself (Abbott 1984, 1991). We get too the notion that professions are regulated by statutes which delegate actual oversight to freestanding professional bodies, something that, as it happens, is true in the English language and common-law world but almost universally false elsewhere. The article also produces a notion of professional autonomy straight out of an ethics textbook, uninformed by knowledge of the realities of the modern hospital or accounting firm. The truism that professions are of high status is footnoted to a professional association pamphlet, even though there exists a vast and controversial scholarly literature on occupational prestige. This rather conservative picture of professions is then undercut by a long section on gender and racial inequality, footnoted to newspapers (and even to Jet magazine). The enormous scholarly literature on these two topicsthe largest body of work on professions in the last 20 yearsis unmentioned. The article then concludes with an enormous list of all the possible traits of professions, twenty-one of them in total. It is unaware that as early as 1964, Geoffrey Millerson (1964:6) showed that across

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many authors there was no agreement whatever as to which traits were really crucial to professions.1 In short, the Wikipedia article on professions is about the quality of a good but not excellent undergraduate paper. It has gotten beyond its authors preoccupation with accounting. It has tried to come up with a general, abstract definition of professions. It has a dim awareness of some of the problems of its views. (We do for example get some idea that professions grow and decline, although the only one mentioned as declining is the clergy.) It has also discovered at least a few works that are close to the cutting edge of scholarly work on professions (Freidson and Dezalay/Sugarman), although it does not recognize them as such or, if it does, simply assumes that they say more elaborate versions of the same things found in more accessible texts. The pattern of sourcesone or two main sources, neither of them central in the literature, plus a variety of fairly randomly selected internet sites (15 of 28 footnotes are internet-based)is quite characteristic of todays undergraduate work. This earnest but inexpert character continues on the talk page related to the article. Many of the comments are taken up with defining a profession, precisely the issue the scholarly literature has long set aside. One commenter does see that much of the page seems to be taken up with people arguing that their employment counts as a profession. But after carefully protesting his innocence (I am *not* attacking the skills and importance of the proposed professions) he settles back into definitionalism: there needs to be some way to state what is or isnt a profession. The most important fact here is actually the care to avoid giving offence, which identifies the conversation as predominantly a social rather than an intellectual one. Still another commenter (an editor) notes removing a long section on home economics, which he suspected of copyright violation and NPOV violations (NPOV is a Wikipedia acronym for neutral point of view), since it seems to be advocating steps to be taken so that home economics could be recognized as a profession. Later in the discussion, it is claimed that the military is a profession and should be one of the classical four (instead of three), a claim footnoted to US Army Field Manual #1! Throughout the discussion there is a clear (and erroneous) assumption that there is a nonperformative definition of profession, and a curious combination of worries about neutrality on the one hand with usage of obviously self-interested sources on the other. Another voice suggests creating a separate article on professionalism and appends the outline of such an article. A reply says that this material would duplicate what is in the professions article already, but the original complainer retorts (rather idealistically) that the professions article: is a mixed jumble of information about Professions and Professionalism. These would be far more effective if they were teased out and split into two separate articles. Even non-professionals can and ideally should adhere to professionalism in their lives.
1

I should note that Perks (1993), the main source for the Wikipedia article, does in fact mention Millerson (as it does Larson and myself), and in fact includes an analysis of Millersons own doubts about traits. But it too does not draw the conclusion that profession is itself a dubious category and therefore falls back fairly easily into the traits approach. It is, in fact, a very thoughtful book about the social relations of accounting, buthardly surprising in a textbookit takes the profession itself for granted.

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There follows a further debate about whether all professions require regulation and membership of professional associations, initiated by a scientist who thinks himself a professional. He is told, in a sudden burst of (false) legalism: Unfortunately, you are using profession in the vernacular.... Science is almost always an occupation, not a profession (the exceptions being medicine, pharmacy, etc. and engineering and certain other disciplines depending on where you live. The word profession is technically a state/province regulated term that can only be applied to specific groups of people. After an amusing exchange about professional collusion, with quotes from Adam Smith and George Bernard Shaw, the discussion ends with worries about the dated citations on male dominance of professions (the references are of course not only dated but also hopelessly random). Various recent data are adduced, with further discussion about NPOV. Overall, this conversation resembles nothing so much as a dinner chat in a university dining hall. It is a melange of mixed agendas, unstated moral positions, sharpeven contemptuousassertions of (usually erroneous) authority, and vastly different levels of actual knowledge, all sustained by a kind of youthful energy and a noble but naive faith. Its participants are concerned and eager. They know a lot of different things and are willing to prospect for more to the best of their limited time and ability. They are committed to a kind of collective enterprise of inquiry. That said, both the article and this discussion are fundamentally ignorant. They are ignorant that both their topic and their approach to that topic were dynamited 20 years ago in the scholarly literature. Moreover, they are not only ignorant of the state of the art in the scholarly literature, they are also largely unaware of the scholarly literature altogether. They have no clue even how to find that literature or how to identify it when they run across it, although it could be found and identified by a person with standard library skills in an hour or two in any library that has access to Web of Science, JSTOR, and the Annual Review series. Indeed, one has the sense that this group of people is more committed to having the debate than to finding a conclusionanother hallmark of undergraduate thinking. Deciding what a profession is and what it means to be a professional is for themas for most people in the worlda debate about personal identity, not a problem in social theory or sociological analysis.

The Scholarly Literature It is little surprising that an international expert on a topic finds the Wikipedia page on that topic ignorant, not only of his work and its implications, but of the scholarly literature more generally. But what about the scholarly literature itself? Does it actually know anything more than the amateurs? The ISI databases for social sciences and humanities reveal 109 articles that cited my book in 2008, of which articles one was withdrawn (because plagiarized), one listed my book in its reference list but did not cite it in the text, and two were in languages I do not read (Croatian and Swedish), leaving 105 for my final

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sample.2 These articles are very widely scattered in the literature. They involve 193 authors, only seven of them more than once. The authors are themselves scattered in many universities: one university (Montreal) producing four authors, six universities producing three authors, twenty-one producing two authors, and 102 producing one author. Only 41% of the articles appear in US journals, 17% in English journals, 13% in Canadian, and the rest fairly widely scattered elsewhere. Only two journals (Human Relations and Sociology of Health and Illness produce as many as four citing articles, two produce three citing articles (Journal of Organizational Behavior and Social Science and Medicine, ten produce two citing articles, and fully 75 produce only one. As for areas, the ISI area coding is unclear, but it too suggests a broad scatter. Of the 109 articles only 25 have sociology as one of their (up to three) subject areas. A goodly number have general topics, but about a quarter of the papers involve medical occupations and another quarter involve business or management occupations. Among the remainder are discussions of all sorts of professions: the military, lawyers, teachers, social workers, information scientists, architects, advertisers, and so on. In summary, these articles are all over the map, whether we look in terms of authors or journals or universities or disciplines or subjects. For more detailed analysis, I electronically located the 105 citing articles and extracted all references to my work including the entire paragraph in which these references appeared (or in the case of footnote-based reference formats, both the note and the relevant text).3 I then read these and rated the following things: 1. centrality (in the argument of the citer) of the reference to me: on a scale of 1 = unimportant to 5 = central 2. centrality (in the argument of my book) of the thing I am cited for: on a scale of 1 = unimportant to 5 = central 3. whether the citation actually understood my work correctly: 1= openly wrong, 2 = too general or trivial to tell, 4 = substantive and right, 5 = substantive and precisely right 4. Whether the citation was, in my own view, really needed for the thing it was in fact cited for (Y or N): 5. Whether the citation to me appeared in a parenthesized list: 6. Whether the citation to me specified actual pages. I could not effectively distinguish the first two scales: only a few authors seemed to have me centrally cited for things that were not central to my argument. Mostly this happened when I was cited to support empirical assertions about particular professions that had been mere examples in my book. The results are quite revealing. In my view, only about a quarter of these 105 articles (27) actually needed to cite my book. Of those, a little less than half (13) used the work centrally in their arguments, for things that had been central in my argument, and got my argument right in the process. The 14 remaining papers also needed to cite me, but for points that were not central to their arguments, although they usually had been to mine. These too are proper citations. Beyond these 27
To insure replicability, I have used ISIs definition of 2008, (that is, they are selected as 2008 by the cited reference search page) which seems to mean that the articles were input to the database in 2008. About 15% of them carry 2007 dates in the sources themselves. For the record, none of these papers is by myself. 3 Two or three of the articles were not available to me electronically. For those, I retrieved physical copies.
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papers, about another 20 got my argument substantively correct (4 or 5 on the second scale) but didnt really need to cite me about it, usually because the point was a general one (professions compete) or simply a word ownership matter (they felt they could not refer to the jurisdiction of professions without citing me.). Note that specification of actual pages in my work was not more common in any one of these kinds of papers than in the others. There were 24 articles with page citations. A third were in the first, central users group, a third were in the needed to cite even though it wasnt central group, and a third were in the group that got me right but didnt really need the citation at all.4 So far we have roughly 45 articlesslightly under halfwhich cited my book and got it right in some non-trivial manner. None of these first 45 articles cited my book in a list. Beyond these, another 15 or so articles at least cited the book alone (with no other items), even though the citation was a trivial one justifying some utterly general assertion like professions control work. A total of 63 articles, then, cited my book alone. By contrast, fully 42 cited it in lists (as in Abbott 1988; Larson 1977; MacDonald 1995). The modal list length is three items, as is the median. Lists ranged up to eight items. Thus, if authors decide to list at all, they tend to list more than two citations, as if the triviality of citing anyone in particular for a widely-accepted point like professions compete would be assuaged by citing many people for it. Twelve peopleabout 10%cited me for something that was simply wrong. In one case an apparent copying error produced a page-cited quotation from my book that does not appear on that page, or, I am pretty sure, anywhere in the book. Most of these errors arose from careless writing (e.g., Professionalization explains why occupations develop knowledge bases.) or from not having read the book and simply guessing probably on the basis of other peoples summaries of itwhat I had said. Thus, some thought I was a traits theorist, some thought I must have used the word closure, some thought I didnt discuss specialization within occupations, and so on. In summary, about 12% of these articles used my book centrally and correctly; another 13% did not use it centrally, but needed to cite it and cited it correctly; around 20% didnt need to cite it, but having done so, at least did so both substantively and correctly; 15%20% cited it unnecessarily and trivially but at least by itself; around 35% cited it unnecessarily, trivially, and in a list (typically of three or more citations); and about 10% cited it unnecessarily, trivially, and incorrectly. This is better than Wikipedia, but not as much better as one might expect.5
That nearly a quarter of the citations specified some page or page range seems surprisingly high to me. The decline of page citation since the middle twentieth century (when about 2/3 of references had specifications) has been precipitous. See Abbott (forthcoming). 5 These empirical findings show clearly what many of us have said without empirical data: that analysis of scholarly exchange via the uncritical use of citation data is very unwise. The network analystsand ISI itselfclaim much for citation analysis, usually pursued by applying data mining and clustering algorithms to uncleaned data. But as the present data show, when an expert looks at citations carefully, they can be seen to have no construct validity whatsoever. We would rightly fail an undergraduate paper using all 105 of these citations in a substantive discussion of the professions literature. Nor is the face validity much better. For example, because of optical character recognition errors, only 80% of the references to The System of Professions in the ISI databases actually have the books title correct, although probably 99% of originals have it correct. I located my 105 articles by using Sy* as the title. No doubt there are things like Sistem Professionals and Sstem Professions out there in the ISI data, too, along with the many nonsense titles that at least got the first two letters right and so appear in my list.
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It is important to note that because of my sampling strategy, we dont see papers that should have cited my book but did not. There are clear hints that such papers exist. At least one of the papers in the collection reviewed was deliberately suppressing reference to my work, choosing to attribute its focus on professional competition, internal division, construction of work, and interactions and relationships at the inter- and intraoccupational level (all of them my central topics) to Everett Hughess The Sociological Eye (1971) as if they had not been discussed since. What one has done visibly, others no doubt did with more complete success. It is also true that once a book has a major impact, its conceptsin my case jurisdictionno longer really require citation. Indeed, in my codings above, I have counted as unnecessary those citations whose sole purpose was to cite the word or concept of jurisdiction. The social sciences have no equivalent for the historians citation of the form in the following paragraphs I am following the general arguments of Larson (1977) and Abbott (1988), which takes care of that kind of generic influence without pretending to specific citation.

Varieties of Ignorance I would like now to specify the three different forms of ignorance characteristic of these three bodies of knowledge about the professions. I shall call them amateur ignorance, professional ignorance, and expert ignorance. My analysis has suggested some important dimensions with which to differentiate these varieties. The first is ignorance of facts about the professions. Such facts are legion: facts about professional practice, about professional demography, about professional history, about professional organizations and licensing and examinations and so on. They range from very general to very specific, from one country to another, from one profession to another. The second dimension is ignorance of works written about professions, both by professionals themselves and by sociologists, historians, and others writing about them. These works also are legion: histories of professional firms, chronicles of professional organizations, studies of a given profession in a given place and time, polemics and analyses, institutional analyses and ethnographies. Moreover, at the far edges such works reach into mentions of professions in the course of work on other topics. The third aspect of ignorance involves the skills of thinking about social life. These too are many: the habit of testing multiple hypotheses, the ability to distinguish moral and empirical judgments, the urge for consilience and other forms of rigor, the cultivation of an open mind, the ability genuinely to hear others arguments, and the willingness to recast ones theory if necessary. Skills ignorance is thus the third aspect of ignorance, which complements the two earlier ignorances of facts and literatures. What then, of amateur ignorancethe ignorance of the authors of the Wikipedia entry? Because they know little about how to think about social life, such writers have no guide in the welter of facts and literature. They are at sea in a rowboat. They recognize that something is wrong, but they cant decide in what direction to row. Their intellectual faithsolid enough, if very simpleis that they must be neutral and use sources. Facts and theories slosh over their gunwales with each wave and

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they must bail the boat continuously. But they dont even have a decent bailing can, much less know how to put the intellectual oars in the oarlocks. This is not to say that they dont know a good deal. They probably know hundredsindeed thousandsof facts (and pseudo-facts) about professions that I and my professional colleagues do not; the attendance at last years AMA conference, the exact number of barristers practicing in England today, the way French accountants behave at professional meetings, the percentage of Norwegian midwives who are men, etc. They are not at all ignorant (at least not necessarily ignorant) in terms of facts. Similarly, they have probably read many articles about professions that I and my colleagues have not. I have certainly never read anything about African-American professionals in Jet magazine, nor any accountants textbook on the accounting profession, and so on. Amateur ignorance, that is, is not sheer ignorance of facts or literature; it is principally ignorance of the possible modes for evaluating those facts and then setting them and the literature into an order that will stand against the onslaughts of new facts and literature. This may seem obvious; amateurs lack the specialists knowledge of quality, rigor, and theory. But it is essential to realize that they are not necessarily ignorant of facts and literature. Amateurs may know a great deal about those things. They just dont have any sense how to put that great deal in order; they lack the skills of social thought. As it happens, the people involved in the Wikipedia professions article also dont know much about the facts or literature about the professions. But they could know a lot more and still write a bad Wikipedia article. Professional ignorance is somewhat different. We need to differentiate it into subtypes. Many professionals who cited me were not actually writing about the major topics of my book. Their references to me were decorative, not substantive. They might be signals that an author had read (or knew he should have read) my book. They might be preemptions lest I review the paper for publication and be angry at my omission. They might be attempts to borrow the charisma of a book acknowledged to be classic. None of these is a good reason for citing a book, and that these authors did so anywayoften without much idea what I had said indicates a particular kind of ignorance. This is the ignorance specialists have of other specialized areas and their theoretical literatures. It is coupledas the fact of citation indicateswith a belief that one ought to know (or ought to pretend to know) the major theoretical works of adjacent areas. That is, these are authors who (one hopes) know their own areas well and know that they should have at least a general knowledge of adjacent ones. Such non-specialty ignorance is then the first version of professional ignorance. It does not involve ignorance of the skills of social thinking, but rather of adjacent literatures. Presumably on its own empirical homeland, it is well-informed about both facts and literatures, as well as skilled with reasoning about them. But it evinces a certain cutting of intellectual corners one I have myself done often enough. A second version of professional ignorance is more worrisome. Quite a number of the citing scholars undertook analyses that implicitly denied my books major argument, which is that research about professions should not be done profession by profession, but turf-zone by turf-zone. I have not counted such articles in the above 10% that are wrong citations; those were wrong about the specific idea for which they cited me, not wrong more broadly in terms of the books general argument. But if one looks carefully, a full 46 of the 105 articles are identifiable from their titles,

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abstracts, and contents as concerning single professions, most often within a traits or professionalization theoretical framework that my book rejected decisively. Most of these articles cite me trivially, unnecessarily, or both. Such core literature ignorance involves less facts or skills than it does ignorance of core literature in the field in which research is done. It is quite disturbing.6 A third and less important version of professional ignorance is that of writers who cited the book for particular empirical analyses that were not central to it, but were more conveniently found there than in the sources that I had myself used. Such authors were relying on me to cover holes in their own factual knowledge. Of course the factual command expected of specialists is much higher than that expected of amateurs, and thus the unknown facts for which I was cited are fairly esoteric. But they are still likely to be known to many amateurs, although on a completely random basis. I shall call this in-specialty ignorance. Such ignorance involves not so much the skills of social thinking or the major literature in the area, but rather some minor factual detail outside a citing authors immediate area of expertise. These then are the three varieties of professional ignorance: non-specialty ignorance of specialty literature, core literature ignorance, and in-specialty factual ignorance. They are different from the amateurs ignorance, which although it may involve facts and literatures (and amateurs have little idea of specialties and their boundaries) is dominated by ignorance of the skills for evaluating and synthesizing the facts and literatures that are in fact known. What then of the ignorance of the author himselfexpert ignorance? It seems to me that the foundation of such ignorance is memory. When one has theorized an area, ones theory becomes the means by which one remembers all the facts, trends, and analyses leading up to that theory. Indeed, ones theory becomes the means by which one remembers the layout of literatures in the field. One cannot avoid so reifying ones own theory, particularly if it is closely related to broader patterns in ones theoretical thinking. My own general allegiance to processual, ecological, and dynamic thinking is evident in this book. Indeed, the writing of it confirmed me in those theoretical habits, which have sustained all my later theories as well. All this means that my own memories of the facts, theories, patterns, and histories of professions are all driven by my theoretical synthesis itself. They are the way I remember the details, which would otherwise have long since seeped away. I am, indeed, overwhelmed by the detail of my own footnotes. I have no recollection whatever of at least a third of the specific facts there, not even a memory of having once known them. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that the book was written by a stranger. But the main argument I know today more clearly than when I first wrote it. Twenty more years of reflection have polished it ever more fully, removing the rough edges or, put another way, weakening through progressive abstraction the complex links that tied the original synthesis to empirical analysis. Yet a theoretical synthesis is just that: one theoretical synthesis, one weaving of a fabric of theories and facts. Doing sociology means making such temporary tapestries, not molding and baking rigid bricks that support a giant, cumulative
6

On the positive side, I should note that a full 26 of the 105 papers are clearly conceiving of the world in an interprofessional, competitive way, following the books main argument. Whether they get this from the book or not, it represents a major shift in patterns of writing about the professions since thirty years ago.

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building. And the warp and weft of the argumentthe facts and patterns of which I wove the general pattern that is The System of Professionsare still out there in the life world, to be rewoven by another artisan with a different vision. And I am myself now ignorant of many of these facts and patterns, because I remember mainly those that accord with the vision I saw, now part of the rug that floors my inner intellectual sanctum. I did weave tightly; that is what McKenna (2006) meant when he said I had killed the field. But one can see in these articles of 2008 some loosening, some forgetting, and possibly some quite helpful ignorance, all of which will eventually prepare the ground for another synthesis. The ignorance of experts is thus dominated by the use of synthesis as a means of memory as well as summary. I shall call it synthetic ignorance. It is in many ways the reverse of amateur ignorance, reflecting too much synthetic power rather than too little. Given these types of ignorance, I can now turn to the question of whether ignorance might be functional, the subject of most early sociological work on ignorance. (Much has also been written about pluralistic ignorance, but that is a quite specific socially structured form of ignorance, not the phenomenon of ignorance more generally.) The functional argument was set out by Moore and Tumin (1949) who assigned five possible functions to ignorance: 1) preservation of privilege, 2) preservation of traditional values, 3) preservation of stereotypes, 4. maintenance of fair competition, and, finally, 5) provision of incentives for hard work (to insure against a future of which we are ignorant). A later language might have called these five mechanisms of ignorance, since they arise as consequences of simplified individual-level arguments about ignorance situations. (Schwartz 1976 uses many of these arguments in his empirical study.) Revisiting ignorance a decade later, Schneider (1962) tried to elucidate the detailed mechanisms necessary to ignorance effects, identifying seven of these. Four come from the Moore and Tumin line of argument: indirectness, ignorance proper, the presence and attraction of intermediate agents, and eufunctionalism. Two come from organic theorizing of ignorance (Menger, Hayek et al.): ignorance of borrowed knowledge (as when people use a technique without understanding what knowledge is embodied in it) and translational mechanisms, a phrase that seems to refer to the institutionalized feedback systems that keep a functional system going even without the knowledge of participants (cf. Stinchcombe 1968 on functional explanation.) There are thus two basic views of the functions of ignorance: a let sleeping dogs lie version, which is explicitly conservative, since ignorance favors the status quo, and a cunning of reason version of ignorance, which is implicitly conservative because it argues that life is too complex to figure out, and hence that following existing institutions is usually optimal. By contrast, Schneider (1962) argues for a liberating view of ignorance, trying to specify the conditions when ignorance might lead to positive (e.g., democratic) results. The locus classicus of such arguments is the Mertonian theory of science. Indeed, Merton (1987) argued for functions of ignorance in science in particular. He distinguished unspecified ignorance, which is essentially noise as far as science is concerned, and specified ignorance, which comprises clearly identified scientific unknowns whose resolution will probably result in serious advance. This distinction seems persuasive as an empirical description of much scientific practice.

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But the Mertonian theory seems to presuppose subsumption: new and better knowledge works because it subsumes what we already know. That is, Merton has a brick model, not a tapestry model, in terms of my earlier analysis. Subsumption matters because it dodges the welter of reality problem. We usually assume that to know something is to possess it as a piece of information (e.g., when we know how fast a rock is falling down a mountain). But we also speak of knowing something if we understand it to be a potential empirical instance of a general law which we do know immediately (as in the case where we dont know anything about a particular rock but know we could predict its future course if we knew certain parameters about its current motion). So in this account, knowing the laws of motion is knowing all that is necessary to know about all rocks falling down all mountains. On the assumption that subsumed facts remain knowledge, we dont lose anything as science becomes more and more abstract. But this presupposes a directionality to knowledge. If we were to completely lose earlier facts by becoming more abstract, we could not assume that specified ignorance was leading us in a uniformly good direction. In my terms, that is, specified ignorance is subject to what I have earlier called synthetic ignorance; I have myself forgotten many of the facts about professions on which I based my theory and now remember those that I do remember only through the theory itself. Put in Kuhns celebrated language, specified ignorance is determined by the paradigms of the specifier. In my terms, then, ignorance is functional only when it is not all of one variety. I myself will probably never be able to see the professions differently from the way I already have. But because of the various types of professional ignorance, there will be enough drift eventually for somebody to come up with a new expert synthesis. Only if we think that my theory subsumes all preexisting knowledge of the professions would we think that that would be a bad thing. This multilevel approach to ignorance has, however, little resonance with the current literature. Under the shadow of the internet, todays writing on ignorance has moved rapidly towards a concern with overabundance of information, with welter. With this change has come a flattening of the hierarchy of abstractions. My three ignorancesof facts, literatures, and skillshave been squeezed into a model based on factual ignorance, following the obsession of information science with bits of knowledge. Curiously, this has allowed theorists of ignorance to become extremely abstract, as we see in Smithsons (1985, 1989) elaborate typology of ways of not knowing things and in Grosss (2007) graph model (unsigned, and therefore imponderable) of forces shaping ignorance. To the extent that there is empirical literature (e.g., Ungar 2008), it has begun to align with the longstanding work on the ignorance of public affairs among voters (Delli Karpini and Keeter 1996 is the classic of this genre.) The multilevel approach to ignorance seems to me more productive than the new focus on pure welter. For in the area of professions we can see that, oddly enough, one of the great experts has joined handsimplicitly, to be surewith the Wikipedians. In his last major book, the late Eliot Freidson (2001, c9) concluded a long and distinguished career with an impassioned essay on The Soul of Professions. He bemoaned the loss of moral authority in the professions, the excessive reliance on technical expertise, the ceding of institutional control to capitalists, and states, and bureaucracies. What are these, indeed, if not the moral

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concerns driving the Wikipedians in their conversations about who is a professional and who is not, about the necessity of everyone being professional about work, and so on? The normative agenda deliberately set aside in my own work is here reborn. Thus, the different levels of ignorance reencounter one another, and from that encounter will come eventually a new synthesis, for a time, until the kaleidoscope shifts again. We are all ignorant, the Wikipedians, my colleague scholars, and myself. But we are ignorant in different ways. The amateur Wikipedians have not the thinking skills to arrange their facts, although they know many indeed and earnestly seek to improve their knowledge of professions. As for the professionals, they are ignorant in various ways, some more worrisome than others: many are ignorant and careless about adjacent fields; a disturbing number are ignorant about the real argument of something that they claim to know and, in some cases, do think they know very well; some are just a cutting corners in terms of primary sources. As for me, I know a great deal of both the facts and the literature of professionalism, but inevitably I use my own theory as a mnemonic device, and so I tend to remember the facts and patterns that illustrate it best. Indeed, I remember the theory itself better than anything else. It is not the quantity of ignorance that matters. Of the things that could be known about this or any other topic, the smartest of us knows but few. It is rather the quality. Ignorance of skills of thinking is fatal. Ignorance of core literatures is nearly fatal. Ignorance of adjacent literatures should be minimized, but will always be with us. And finally, expert ignorance is among the most dangerous. For it makes us unable to see the new. Our very memory begins to prevent us from learning. The synthetic scholar must continually read new workscholarly literature to some degree, but above all new facts. Always, we are only beginning to think.

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