ACCOMPLISHING PROFESSION.

The article attempts to develop an alternative, drawing on author's work on the social organization of health visitor training begin by reviewing what remains the dominant contemporary mode of thinking about "profession." The attribute approach, and the main criticisms of it, which one may broadly identify as structural, political and epistemological. The author's argument will be that each of these is, in its own way, inadequate and that one should, rather, proceed to the empirical investigations of socially distributed commonsense knowledge of social structures, abandoning any claim to legislate a correct use of the term "profession," but treating it as a concept invoked by members of particular collectivities and seeking to describe its practical usage. The data employed in this paper were collected by participant observation of a polytechnic health visiting course over a period of twelve months. Material was obtained in lectures, tutorials and informal situations within the school and on home visits and clinic sessions during the student's concurrent fieldwork experience. As far as possible, field notes were recorded at the time of the observation.