The Rise (and Fall?) of Professionalism: Logics of Work in Popular Discourse About Teachers in the United States, 1990-2019

• In Event: Beyond Lortie: New sociological perspectives on professions and their application to teaching

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes: Popular perceptions of occupational groups are a key link between occupations and larger social and political forces (Abbott, 1988; Freidson, 2001). Teaching is a uniquely public-facing occupation (Lortie, 1975), making popular perceptions of teachers particularly important determinants of occupational organization and control. Little empirical research, however, has explored popular perceptions of teachers and how (if at all) these perceptions have changed over time. This study fills this gap by examining the “logics” that animated popular discourse about teachers in the United States between 1990 and 2019, a particularly intense period of debate about teaching.

Theory: This study examines the underlying “logics” expressed in public discourse about teachers. Logics are ‘‘socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules’’ (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999, p. 804). Freidson (2001) argued that three central logics guide the organization and control of work, which he termed the market, managerial, and professional logics. These three logics differ in the knowledge and discretion they assume are required by work, as well as their conceptions of the goals, control, and types of training required.

Methods: This study uses the methods of corpus linguistics, which focus on understanding patterns of language use and the relationships between these patterns and the contexts in which language use occurs (Barth & Schnell, 2022). Specifically, I use collocation analysis, a set of methods for exploring patterns in the co-occurrence of words in texts. Collocation analysis is based on the idea that words which occur together more (or less) often than otherwise expected are related in some way. For this analysis, I examined collocate words that occurred within a four-word span on both sides of the word “teacher.”

Data: Data for this study are drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies, 2008), a text corpus that contains more than one billion words drawn from nearly 500,000 texts from the years 1990-2019. I focused on three COCA genres: magazines, which contained the full text of articles from nearly 100 popular magazines; newspapers, which contained full text of articles from national, regional, and local newspapers; and spoken, which contained transcripts of unscripted conversation from more than 150 different television and radio news programs.

Results: I find that the professional logic dominated popular discourse about teachers across this period, although the market logic has increasingly become a part of popular discourse about teachers over time, particularly in rightward-leaning media outlets.

Scientific or Scholarly Significance of the Study or Work: This study is the first to examine the logics that have shaped popular discourse about teachers and the changes in the relative dominance of these logics over time. The findings of this study deepen our understanding of the past and present challenges facing the teaching occupation, as well as the future of debates over the organization and control of teaching.

Author

• Matthew Shirrell, The George Washington University