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This chapter unpacks Butler's commitment to cultural continuity amidst political change, emphasizing his insistence on the value of the Anglo‐Irish legacy to independent Ireland's development. It explores his defence of the eighteenth‐century Ascendancy and his celebration of its more liberal and intellectual members. It identifies his promotion of local cultural life and amateur scholarly pursuit as ideals gleaned from this former age. It examines his own experience as an independent scholar and writer and his sustained critique of professionalized learning. It reviews his research into Irish tribal ancestor figures, culminating in the 1972 publication of his book Ten Thousand Saints. It relates his archaeological research to his advocacy of the conservation of Ireland's built heritage. It reviews the principles undergirding his genealogical interest and his efforts in launching the Butler Society in 1960s.

This chapter shows how the resources underpinning the early chambers predominantly came from subscriptions, but shifted progressively to user fees, and after the 1970s were supplemented by government contracts. This has changed the relation between members and the chambers, but analysis of management practices demonstrates that subscriptions were, and remain, a critical influence on member decisions. The governance of chambers has evolved from purely voluntary elected officers to a professional staff of contract managers. The tensions in this shift are analysed, together with possible influences on ‘management sorting’. Analysis of committee structures shows a broadening to encompass wider interests and sector structures, and to respond to government threats.

This chapter considers how World War II impacted the possibilities of the professionalization of tennis by looking closely at the careers of several California players who, to varying degrees, benefitted from the player development programs put in place by Perry T. Jones in Los Angeles. Don Budge reappears as a champion whose playing career took a turn for the worst during the 1940s. Bobby Riggs presents a study in contrast in terms of both infamy and as a player who benefitted from wartime disruptions. In the latter 1940s Jack Kramer became the dominate touring professional.

Chapter 5 details Breckinridge’s collaboration with Edith Abbott at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, exploring the pair’s distinctive approach to the professionalization of social work and their consistent emphasis on public welfare programs. Building on their previous collaboration at the private Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, Breckinridge and Abbott worked in tandem to build the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration and to make it the premier school of social work in the United States. This chapter examines the two women’s distinctive approach to social work, basing social welfare policy on social science research and emphasizing public programs rather than individual responsibility.

Walter Besant waged what some would call a relentless campaign for copyright reform in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. At its core was an insistence on proper remuneration for authors, yet his campaign may also be seen as part of his broader aim for authorship to attain the status of a profession on par with medicine or law. In Besant’s hands, copyright reform thus takes on important social and political functions in addition to its more pragmatic aim of protecting authors’ rights.

While the rise of “styling,” “streamlining,” and specialized industrial design offices has been typically described as a specifically American response to the expansion of consumer markets and the challenges of the Great Depression, artists born and educated in Europe played a significant role in this process. This chapter sets out to trace rise of commercial dersign while systematically highlighting the contributions of European émigrés. Aside from work on individual immigrant artists, there is no comprehensive account of the impact European émigrés on commercial design in the United States. Yet, transatlantic exchanges significantly shaped the appearance of American consumer goods and commercial aesthetics by mid-century. Much like Loewy, moreover, some of the émigrés became prominent champions of a “new type of artist” with little inhibition in engaging in commercial art. The resulting “romance of commerce and culture” (James Sloan Allen) became a crucial aspect of modern consumer capitalism.

This chapter discusses the growth of the movement and how decisions about how to organize and construct a collective identity produced unintended consequences that would change the movement’s direction dramatically. To spread their accounts of Circuit Riding, leaders put together two sets of meetings: the Riders Roundups, which were designed to articulate a collective identity for the movement in order to enroll new members, and the National Strategy for Nonprofit Technology, which targeted foundations and was intended to secure resources for the movement’s growth as well as to institutionalize Circuit Riding. The two sets of meetings highlight a tension in the development of organizational fields between forces of stabilization and those of change. However, their organizing strategy created opportunities for a challenger to gain foothold in the field and led to the conventionalization of a set of practices different from those espoused by the Circuit Riders.

Chapter 1 argues that the Boy Scouts of America triumphed over competing programs by shifting emphasis from the virile primitivism and boy autonomy that defined the Woodcraft Indians and Boy Pioneers toward a balance with modern masculine values such as scientific efficiency, cooperative interdependence, and expert management. The Boy Scout organization gradually achieved a parallel compromise between local Scoutmasters’ charismatic volunteerism and the professionalization and bureaucratization of paid Scout Executives in charge of the national and local Scout council offices. America’s elite and government officials at all levels joined a widening spectrum of cultural and economic groups that supported Boy Scouting. Chapter 1 concludes by analyzing the organization’s resulting rapid membership growth and geographical spread in the 1910s and 1920s.

This chapter focuses on the famous botanist and director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Joseph Hooker, and his journeys in South Asia. Joseph Hooker’s journeys provide a typical case study of a significant shift in the network of exchange from a diversity of people engaged in botanical “discovery” to a white, male-dominated profession. While professional botanists such as Joseph Hooker relied on indigenous knowledge about cultivation, soil erosion, adaptation and medicinal uses of plants collected in British holdings, local collectors who performed the majority of the work increasingly became silent partners in “discovery.” Botany and the expansion of Empire are intimately tied during the mid-nineteenth century and the hardening of the colonial categories of race, class and gender is evidenced by this shift towards botany as an exclusionary science. The professionalization of botany led to the exclusion of women and colonial subjects from the science of discovery.

In his influential reinterpretation of Victorian scientific naturalism, Frank Turner construed it as a tool for advancing the professionalized structure of modern science. We would do better to see it as a broad movement of reform, aiming to reconstruct public culture on the basis of a new ethic of knowledge and inquiry rather than faith. Even the shift away from public science, gaining momentum by the early twentieth century, was no victory of professional exclusivity. Always, science takes shape, not autonomously, but in relation to patrons, clients, and audiences. By the end of the Victorian era, it was adapting to strengthened alliances with state institutions that welcomed a focus on technical ideals of knowledge.

The Prologue introduces how and why amateur historians Quantrille McClung and Bernice Blackwelder wrote about the frontiersman Christopher “Kit” Carson. They wrote in the context of the Cold War, when men like Carson still seemed the heroes of U.S. westward expansion. They published when books about the West were as likely to be written by amateur as academic historians, though most of the buffs were white men, not women. Blackwelder and McClung kept writing into the 1970s but under different conditions. Not only had the field professionalized, putting them at further disadvantage, but also, with the changes that social movements brought to politics and popular culture, western deities like Carson were falling from grace. Underneath this story run questions about how we know what we know about history and how what we know is shaped by the conditions of our knowing.

Chapter 3 focuses on the 1930s and 1940s when American influence was already recasting Rio’s commercial thoroughfares with the help of Brazilian merchants. Retailing in Rio, São Paulo, and other Brazilian cities began to emulate that of North America. These changes were part of a larger romance between Brazil and the U.S that was broken, only in part, when the World War II-era alliance failed to yield a measure of postwar prosperity or abundance as recompense for wartime shortages and surrender of sovereignty over strategically crucial north-eastern bases. Against this backdrop occurred the professionalisation of advertising and sales promotion and the continued commercialization of the press and radio, buoyed by radio soap operas.

Through an analysis of newspaper accounts of Union medical care and frontline and home-front medical writings this chapter seeks to draw the experiences, expectations, and perceptions of Union surgeons employed by the Army Medical Department into the broader intellectual, literary, and cultural responses to the Civil War. It argues that their perspective informed the development of a new national relationship between the soldier and the state, and that this found professional and public expression in the medical imperative to calibrate and count the true physical cost of the conflict. In effect, Union surgeons criticized even as they confirmed the nation’s technological and organizational progress during the Civil War. And although medical professionalization was a crucial component of the postwar scientific, managerial revolution through which the health of both the individual and the national body could be charted and improved, in their emphasis on medical failure rather than on military success during the Civil War Union surgeons challenged, indeed contradicted, the northern narrative of redemption through suffering in the cause of freedom.

The bulk of the introduction is devoted to identifying the scope, themes, and objectives of the book, each section and chapter being described in brief. An assessment of current maternal and infant mortality rates in the United States is presented and the book’s geographic realm and historical context are isolated. The micro-level and macro-level components of maternity care used throughout as an analytic tool are defined, as are the various classifications of American midwives. The historiography of African American lay midwifery and the professionalization of midwifery is discussed.

This chapter examines the role played by political parties and think tanks in the development of policy analysis in France. It shows how party-based policy analysis is interwoven with inter and intra-party competition related to the objective of seeking office. Indeed, even though policy seeking activities do not look central in the functioning of French political parties, developments in party rationales, like those in the profile of governing parties’ elites, are favourable to intensifying interest in policy issues. Political parties’ professionalization nonetheless appears to have a marked effect on their internal production of public policy expertise: party membership is marginalised while the electoral issues and internal competition have a structuring impact. Lastly, analysis of public policy expertise production shows that it is mainly done in the vicinity of party organisations, due to the significant recourse to experts outside of parties and the role of think tanks.

In the form of a lyric essay, this chapter interrogates the motives and methods of mainstream folklore scholarship. The author identifies a variety of factors that discourage folklorists from taking more expressive chances in order to understand the specialized style that has come to dominate folklore scholarship. This hyper-professionalization of folkloristic writing has, the author argues, led to what Benjamin Botkin once called “folklorists talking to themselves or folklore in vacuo.” In order to make folklore studies resonate with a broader audience, the author calls for folkloristic writing that is more imaginative and less thesis-driven, writing that invites the curious in rather than excluding them in the name of scholarly prestige.

This chapter explores the relationship between Christianity and evolution from the publication of Origin of Species to World War II and recalls the immediate intellectual context within which the ASA and RSCF were established. Drawing on sources from both sides of the Atlantic, it shows the variety of ways evangelicals responded to Darwinism and evolution around the turn of the twentieth century, surveys key events in the professionalization of science, and reveals the dearth of profitable dialogue between science and religion during the interwar period.

This chapter charts how aid accountability in Christian aid partnerships selectively combines neoliberal and biblical reasoning on what it means to be morally accountable, creating an emerging, religiously-informed medical audit culture. In the Madagascar-Minnesota medical aid program, aid workers interestingly bring together both bureaucratic accountability’s emphasis on transparency in the use of aid resources and a biblically-based ideology that being accountable means invisibly accompanying fellow Christians elsewhere, as Jesus did on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:13-35. While American Lutherans predominantly view their own immobility as the most ethical position, sending medical relief objects and not people or missionaries to Madagascar, accountability requirements certainly travel and have been increasingly woven into each donation of medical relief, financial support or equipment. Moving in the chapter from the Midwest U.S. to Madagascar, the chapter builds a multi-sited portrait of accountability work as a “mobile” or traveling form of humanitarian governance (Pandolfi 2010), understood and enacted in culturally distinct ways. Audit procedures lay bare a vexing set of questions for both Malagasy and Americans: What does it ultimately mean to be accountable, and how is it assessed? Do accountability requirements between fellow believers contradict contemporary principles of global religious communion?

This chapter explores two interrelated oral forms: conversion and call narratives. It establishes that they were cultural productions of the New South era, and that they wove elements of African and European religious tradition together to craft a distinct understanding of Christianity’s place in the world—either as an initiate enters into it, or as a religious authority proclaims it. The speakers, dates, and geographic scope of these narratives are traced, and then a close analysis of the oral forms highlights their characteristic features. The vision articulated in the narratives is shown to be very different from the dominant religious culture, where religious authority was professionalized and Christianity was associated with the safe stability of the home. In sharp contrast, the narratives imagine the wildness and liminality of Christianity.

As chapter 5 shows, beginning in mid-1943 and accelerating in the following years, concern was building among law enforcement and party authorities that bribery was becoming more prevalent. A postwar “campaign” expressed the goal of eradicating this scourge from the Soviet landscape. Why was the bribe such a source of disquiet? Authorities expressed anxiety that its existence could erode the legitimacy of institutions and, ultimately, of the regime itself, in the eyes of the population. An antibribery drive was launched in 1946, and periodically (if briefly) re-energized over the next six years; the main, but not exclusive, target was corruption in the courts and in the branches of the state prosecutors’ office. This “campaign,” however, was seriously flawed in practice, not least of all because it was waged in complete secrecy. Why were authorities so slow to pursue bribery, and to allow public discussion of the problem? An analysis of the contentious internal conversations surrounding the postwar “struggle against bribery” provides insight into official attitudes toward the crime, and hesitation by central party officials and the legal agencies to press forward enthusiastically with measures to control it.