The high income and status enjoyed by traditional professional groups such as doctors and lawyers still make these attractive careers in which one finds a high proportion of people from upper-middle-class backgrounds. Workers in many other less highly remunerated occupations, such as nurses, teachers and social workers, as well as personnel officers, librarians and local government officers, have aspired to become professionals, and in doing so have improved their economic position and status relative to other groups. This means obtaining recognition from the rest of society as the custodians of a specialist body of knowledge and skills, and permission from the state to exercise the same control over who is entitled to hold a professional qualification (Freidson, 1970; Johnson, 1972; Larson, 1977; Abbott, 1988). Many writers have argued that the 20th century saw the triumph of professions as a form of organising work and expertise, but this dominance has been obtained at a price. The professions have always had admirers who believe that our whole society depends on having alternative sources of power and moral authority to the market or the state (Freidson, 2001). There are, however, also critics who see them as a self-interested group out to advance their own income and status at the expense of the public.

The objective in this chapter is to address the issue of how professionals understand quality, and why many have negative views about quality assurers. However, to understand why this is such a charged issue, it is also necessary to revisit some of the general debates about professions and their place in society that have interested so many political commentators and social theorists in the last hundred years. Although some of these debates can become quite abstract, the various theoretical positions rest on widely shared prejudices about the role of experts in contemporary societies.