(thanks to kardsunlimited)
Years ago, as a naive graduate student at Warwick, I was invited to a conference on lawyers, doctors and others at Oxford. Philip Lewis organised it. What I loved about the conference was that all my heroes in the sociology of the professions and lawyers were there--Eliot Freidson, Terry Johnson, Marc Galanter, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Maureen Cain, plus more. These were the people whose work I was reading and using to guide my own research.
The resulting book was published in 1983 and became an essential text for anybody researching in the field of professions. It still is an essential text, losing none of its force and acuity. Unfortunately the book went out of print.
But I'm glad to say that The Sociology of Professions: Lawyers, Doctors and Others, edited by Robert Dingwall and Philip Lewis has been reissued by Quid Pro Books. The publisher has commissioned a new foreword to this edition by Sida Liu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sida Liu writes:
“it is a rare effort to fully compare the two classic cases of doctors and lawyers in the professions literature. The contributors of the book include a number of prominent authors on the professions in Britain and the United States. Until today, it remains a vitally important volume for scholars and students interested in various aspects of professional life...Looking back one must be struck by the extent to which theorists of professions and empirical researchers on doctors and lawyers from both the UK and US fully engage with one another throughout the book.”I'm glad to see this book back. It has so much to tell us. I was thinking about it as I addressed a graduating class of law students today at UCD. It would have been great to have been able to give each of them a copy.
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