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Professionalization is the social process by which any trade or occupation transforms itself into a true profession. This process tends to involve establishing acceptable qualifications, a professional body or association to oversee the conduct of members of the profession and some degree of demarcation of the qualified from unqualified amateurs. This demarcation is often termed occupational closure as it means that the profession then becomes closed to entry from outsiders, amateurs and the unqualified.

Professions also possess power, prestige, high income, high status and privileges; their members soon come to comprise an elite class of people, cut off to some extent from the common people, and occupying an elevated station in society.

The professionalization process tends to establish the group norms of conduct and qualification of members of a profession and tends also to insist that members of the profession achieve conformity more or less strictly with the established procedures and any agreed code of conduct, which is policed by professional bodies, for "accreditation assures conformity to general expectations of the profession." [1]

• Andrew Delano Abbott, The System of Professions: Essay on the Division of Expert Labour, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988
• Jeffrey L. Berlant, Profession and Monopoly: A Study of Medicine in the United States and Great Britain, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975. (ISBN 0-520-02734-5)
• Eliot Freidson, Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970
• Terence James Johnson, Professions and Power, (Study in Sociology Series), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1972
• Keith M. Macdonald, The Sociology of the Professions, London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1995
• Anne Witz, Professions and Patriarchy (International Library of Sociology) London: Routledge,an imprint of Taylor & Francis Books Ltd, 1992

• Article abstracts on this theme
• ESA research network on sociology of professions
• University of Aberdeen reading list: Sociology of Professions
• An issue of Current Sociology devoted to this topic
• A short review of the book by Keith MacDonald
• The Professionalization Process for the Ontario Fire Service
• Professionalization of Exercise Physiology online journal
• Women as Managers of Libraries: A Developmental Process in India
• Prestige, Power, Recognition & Respect in Canadian Child Care
• The Professionalization of Community Interpreting
• Aspects of the profession of Pharmacy