Professions are a central theme in sociology and among the most dynamic and encompassing social institutions. They provide identity, personality, habitus, social capital, income, lifestyle, and status, while also creating cross-cutting groups and hierarchies across different social strata. This is why we need a perspective on professions—especially in Türkiye’s multi-layered societal transformation, we must discuss what professions mean to society. This essay sketches out ten points toward that aim.
1. Professions meet our common needs
Even if everyone in Türkiye had balanced nutrition, exercised regularly, and drank three liters of water a day, disease would still persist. We would still need physicians, nurses, caregivers, and countless other workers, assistants, and technicians who keep the health system functioning. Türkiye still lags behind European countries in physicians per thousand people. The same holds for law: with over 8 million new cases annually in first instance courts, the demand for more, faster, and higher-quality legal services is obvious. As a society, we depend on the services professions provide—not only in health, but also in law, education, security, and food.
2. Professional services are not uniform
The service a profession offers varies by region, institution, and market conditions, regardless of individual skill. Public professionals’ seniority and competence differ across the country. Private sector influence, especially in health and education, commodifies basic services and creates new inequalities. High-end specialties are increasingly concentrated in private institutions. Some professions orient themselves toward corporations and institutional clients. Thus, while professions fulfill common needs, the content, price, segmentation, and packaging of services differ.
3. Professions enable social mobility
We are not only consumers of professional services but also potential professionals ourselves—or our family members are. In Türkiye, the expansion of higher education over the last fifteen years has created high expectations of mobility. Medicine, law, and engineering still attract large numbers of students from lower and lower-middle backgrounds who achieve high exam scores. The old saying “we refused to give our daughter to doctors or engineers” has faded—because now “our daughter” enters those faculties herself, able to make her own choices instead of awaiting a diploma-bearing suitor.
4. Image precedes reality
Professions promise social mobility—up to a point. Bureaucratization, marketization, monopolization of advantageous positions, and regulatory gaps have made mobility uneven across cohorts. Newcomers encounter professions far more competitive, blocked, and less rewarding than the traditional image suggested. Ironically, first-generation professionals from working- or lower-middle-class backgrounds now experience a greater gap between the symbolic promises of professions and the actual realities they face.
5. Professions are arenas of struggle
Take medicine: the Ministry of Health, bureaucracies, medical chambers, specialty associations, faculties, hospital boards, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, unions, and even WhatsApp groups of residents all coexist and interact. They form alliances and conflicts over rights, hierarchy, clinic rules, ideology, discourse, monopoly of authority, symbolic violence, or often simply material income and its distribution. A unified front emerges only when a perceived external threat pushes members to defend the profession collectively.
6. Professions are prisms of social structures
As Bernard Shaw wrote in The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), “all professions are conspiracies against the laity.” Professions sustain themselves through jargon, procedures, and technical rituals that give an aura of autonomy and esotericism. Yet sociology shows nothing is self-contained. The ways society relates to knowledge and power are reproduced in professional roles: doctor–patient, senior–junior, employer–employee, expert–capital. Professions thus act as prisms where broader struggles over authority, hierarchy, and power become sharper and more visible. Examples include “violence against doctors,” rooted in information and power asymmetries, and the “proletarianization of lawyers,” where regulatory gaps meet capitalist labor regimes.
7. Professions are intertwined with the state
In Türkiye, professions—especially medicine, law, and education—emerged within and through the state. In many countries, these fields support modern state-building; in Türkiye, they were simultaneously state employees and state pioneers. The Mekteb-i Tıbbiye was expected not just to heal individuals but the “sick man” Ottoman state. The Ankara Law School (1925) was founded to produce a “new legal generation” for the Republic. Today, professions bear less ideological burden, but the transition from being state-driven to society-driven remains incomplete.
8. State–society relations permeate professions
Uniformed professions remain the most prestigious. Titles, insignia, jargon, and authority place them in asymmetrical relation to the public. Since professions were institutionalized within the state, shifts in state–society relations echo in profession–society relations. Citizens no longer feel merely deprived or grateful but rather demanding, critical, and customer-like. Some professions remain “public” in both senses (serving state and society), while others have already drifted into privatization.
9. Professions and the West
From the 19th century on, Ottoman leaders invested in professions with close awareness of European models—particularly in medicine. Turkish doctors have migrated to Germany since the 1970s, engineers have long moved abroad, and Nobel laureate Aziz Sancar built his career in U.S. universities. This Westward orientation brings both scientific prestige and cultural habits: middle-class distinction, conformity, and a tendency to complain. For a country whose modernization was long defined by “being part of the West,” professionals’ ties to Western centers of knowledge and technology remain strong.
10. What will professions become?
Here, “professions” refers to diploma-based fields such as health, education, science, law, management, and the arts—ISCO-08’s “professionals.” According to TÜİK, 3.997 million people were employed in such professions in mid-2023, 13% of total employment (up from 6% two decades ago). The share will keep rising. Hence debates on professional organizations, stratification, workplace violence, crime, regulation, and mobility will intensify. Two intertwined challenges will dominate: ensuring fairness and justice within professions, and ensuring society has more equitable, higher-quality access to the services they provide.
September 2023. First published here.
Elyesa Koytak 