Journal of Professions and Organization, 2018, 5, 45–57

doi: 10.1093/jpo/jox012
Advance Access Publication Date: 11 December 2017
Scholarly Article

Boundaries and professions: Toward a

processual theory of action
Sida Liu*

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University of Toronto
*Corresponding author. Email: sd.liu@utoronto.ca
Submitted 14 June 2017; Revised 13 November 2017; revised version accepted 16 November 2017

ABSTRACT
This article outlines a processual theory of action for the sociology of professions. It argues that
existing theories of the professions focus primarily on the questions of social order and social change
in professional life but overlook the basic question of social action, namely, what do professionals
do? Individual professionals, their clients, and regulators are all purposive actors, and the professions
are the outcomes of their collective action in the system of work. These actors in professional life
fight for jurisdictions with boundary work, define expertise by diagnostic struggle and coproduction,
and build social networks through exchange. Following the interactionalist tradition of the Chicago
School of work and occupations, the processual theory of professional action examines the interac-
tions of professionals and other actors over, within, and across boundaries and uses this theory of
action to complement existing theories of order and change.

K E Y W O R D S : profession; expertise; jurisdiction; boundary work; diagnosis; exchange

The three questions of action, order, and change are
fundamental to most social theories (Joas and Knöbl
[2004] 2009: 18). For the sociology of professions,
however, existing theories have paid far more atten-
tion to the questions of order and change than the
question of action. Since the 1970s, two paradigms
have dominated the theoretical landscape of the pro-
fessions literature, namely, professionalization
(Wilensky 1964; Berlant 1975; Parry and Parry 1976;
Larson 1977; Abel 1989) and the system of profes-
sions (Hughes 1971, 1994; Abbott 1988). The system
of professions is an ecological theory on how the
social order of professional services is produced by
interprofessional competition, whereas professionali-
zation is a structural theory on how occupational
groups transform into professions through a set of
structural changes such as licensing, association, and
code of ethics. Yet, the very basic question of
action—What do professionals do?—remains under-
theorized despite the increasing number of ethno-
graphic studies on doctors, lawyers, engineers, and
other professionals (e.g., Dingwall and Lewis 1983;
Sarat and Felstiner 1995; Barley 1996; Bechky 2003;
Heritage and Maynard 2006; Desmond 2006; Flood
2013). This article develops a processual theory of
professional action that examines the interactions
among professionals and other actors over, within,
and across boundaries and uses this theory of action
to complement existing theories of order and change.
Earlier theorists have provided many clues on
what the professions do as collective entities. They
argue that professions provide services and solidarity
in modern society (Durkheim 1957; Parsons 1939,
1968), seek market monopoly and social closure

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V

 45
46  S. Liu
(Larson 1977; Weeden 2002; Saks 2010), establish
autonomy and control over work (Freidson 1970,
2001; Abbott 1988), exercise influence in politics and
civil society (Halliday 1985, 1987), and serve as agents
of globalization (Fourcade 2006; Faulconbridge and
Muzio 2012, 2016). Yet, these various answers have
not been integrated into a coherent theory of profes-
sional action. The key problem, in my view, is the
prevalent confusion between two different units of
analysis: professions and professionals. Individual pro-
fessionals, their clients, and state regulators are all pur-
posive actors, and the professions are the outcomes of
their collective action in the system of work. Following
the interactionist tradition of the Chicago School of
work and occupations (Becker 1970; Hughes 1971,
1994; Abbott 1988, 2016), the processual theory of
professional action that I propose in this article focuses
on the interactions among those purposive actors and
examines the social order and change of professions
from their collective action.
The starting point of this processual theory is that
professions are ‘things of boundaries’ (Abbott 1995),
that is, social entities emergent in the processes of
constructing social boundaries. Both Hughes (1971,
1994) and Abbott (1988) argue that professions coex-
ist in a social space of work and they seek to establish
jurisdictional control over a certain area in this space.
These professional jurisdictions are not predeter-
mined, but constructed and settled through interac-
tions regarding their boundaries with one another. As
Abbott acknowledges, in The System of Professions he
takes for granted not only ‘the notion that professions
as convex bodies, with secure heartlands deep behind
the boundary territories’, but also ‘the notion of acting
bodies called professions, capable of being split or
joined, capable of coming into or losing some kind of
permanent existence’ (Abbott 1995: 858). In contrast,
if we adopt a ‘things of boundaries’ perspective, then
‘a profession is a set of turf battles that are later yoked
into a single defensible position in the system of pro-
fessions’ (Abbott 1995: 860).
The theoretical shift from ‘boundaries of profes-
sions’ to ‘professions of boundaries’ is significant
because it implies an ontology that focuses on social
boundaries rather than social entities. I define boun-
daries as ‘sites of difference’ (Abbott 1995: 862)
where symbolic or objectified forms of distinction
are constructed and manifested (Lamont and
Molnár 2002). Social actions in professional life take
two basic forms: conflict and cooperation. For the
professions, a boundary is a site of conflict and coop-
eration between two or more professional or non-
professional actors seeking to establish jurisdictions
over similar work. Both conflict and cooperation can
be observed over, within, and across professional and
other social boundaries (Muzio et al. 2016). These
boundary processes constitute social structures in
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three main spheres of professional action: jurisdic-
tions, expertise, and networks. Table 1 presents a
summary of this conceptual framework.
The social construction of any profession involves
three related tasks. First, the profession establishes
jurisdiction over a certain area of work. The key social
process that constitutes professional jurisdictions is
boundary work, which takes the forms of boundary
making, boundary blurring, or boundary maintenance.
Second, the profession develops a body of expertise
over its core tasks. The key social process that consti-
tutes professional expertise is diagnosis, which takes
the forms of diagnostic struggles or diagnostic copro-
duction. Third, the profession builds internal and
external networks to accumulate and distribute
resources. The key social process that constitutes
professional networks is exchange, which takes the
forms of negotiated exchange, reciprocal exchange, or
symbiotic exchange. While boundary work occurs over
boundaries, diagnosis and exchange occur both
within and across boundaries.
The next three sections of the article elaborate
this conceptual framework in detail. While my
emphasis is on the social construction of ‘professions
of boundaries’, as long as the collective entities of
professions emerge in the social space of work, they
begin to exercise structural constraints on the boun-
dary processes between individual actors. The ecol-
ogy of professions, like other ecologies, is ‘a social
structure that is less unified than a machine or an
organism, but that is considerably more unified than
is a social world made up of the autonomous, atomic
beings of classical liberalism or the probabilistically
interacting rational actors of microeconomics’
(Abbott 2005: 248). Accordingly, the processual
theory of action must be accompanied by a structural
theory of order and change (Saks 2016) to constitute
the theoretical foundation for the sociology of
professions.

Table 1. Boundary processes in professional life
Jurisdictions
over boundaries
Spheres of action Expertise
within & across boundaries
Networks
within & across boundaries
BOUNDARY WORK: THE FORMATION OF
PROFESSIONAL JURISDICTIONS
The social construction of a profession’s jurisdic-
tional boundary is neither a number of structural
mechanisms of social closure (Larson 1977; Weeden
2002) nor a fixed typology of jurisdictional settle-
ments (Abbott 1988). It involves a complex set of
social processes over sites of difference with other
professions or laypersons. Abbott uses the single
concept of ‘jurisdictional conflict’ to characterize
those social processes without providing an analytical
framework for explaining the various patterns of
interaction over jurisdictional boundaries. If we sit-
uate the sociology of professions in the broader
sociological literature, however, it is evident that
jurisdictional conflict is merely a specific type of
boundary work in the area of work and occupations.
The concept of boundary work originates from the
sociology of science. Gieryn (1983, 1999) uses it to
describe the action of scientists to demarcate the
social boundary between science and non-scientific
intellectual activities such as religion and mechanics in
the social space of human knowledge. Focusing on
the ‘problem of demarcation’ (Gieryn 1983: 781),
Gieryn’s original concept of boundary work is closely
related to the monopolization of professional author-
ity and resources as well as the protection of profes-
sional autonomy. This concept has been widely used
to study various types of social boundaries, such as
national boundaries, racial and ethnic boundaries,
class boundaries, religious boundaries, and so on (see
Lamont and Molnár 2002 for a review).
Like Gieryn and Abbott, I use boundary work as a
spatial concept in the processual theory of
Boundaries and professions  47
Forms of action
Boundary making
Boundary Work Boundary blurring
Boundary maintenance
Diagnosis Diagnostic struggle
Diagnostic coproduction
Negotiated exchange
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Exchange Reciprocal exchange
Symbiotic exchange
professional action. This is different from other social
theorists, such as Lamont (1992, 2000) and Wimmer
(2008, 2013), who use boundary work mostly as a
symbolic concept for understanding social classifica-
tions. To do boundary work means to engage in the
construction of a social space, such as the space of
knowledge (Gieryn 1999) or the space of professions
(Abbott 1988, 1995). Accordingly, various patterns of
boundary work all have important spatial consequen-
ces. Abbott’s (1988: 69–79) typology of jurisdictional
settlements (subordination, divided jurisdiction, advi-
sory jurisdiction, etc.) offers a good conceptual frame-
work for understanding those spatial consequences,
but not the processual dynamics of boundary work.
Most existing theories consider boundary work a
process of demarcation between social entities.
However, a boundary can be either a clear line of
demarcation between the jurisdictions of two profes-
sions or an ambiguous and elastic area in which both
professions have certain degrees of control. The lat-
ter situation is illustrated by what Abbott calls
“intellectual jurisdiction” and “advisory jurisdiction”
in his typology of settlements (Abbott 1988: 75-76).
Intellectual jurisdiction refers to the situation when a
profession retains control of the cognitive knowledge
of an area of work but allows practice by its competi-
tors (e.g., psychiatry to social work), while advisory
jurisdiction refers to the situation when one profes-
sion seeks a legitimate right to interpret, buffer, or
modify actions another profession takes within its
jurisdiction (e.g., law to banking). In both scenarios,
the boundary between the two professions is not a
sharp line of demarcation, but a porous area in which
jurisdictional control is ambiguous and elastic.
48  S. Liu
The wide existence of such blurred boundaries in
professional life calls for a more nuanced conceptual-
ization of boundary work than the unitary process of
demarcation. My research on the Chinese legal pro-
fession shows that at least three types of boundary
work can be observed between the competing pro-
fessions as well as between their state regulatory
agencies, namely, boundary making, boundary
blurring, and boundary maintenance (Liu 2008,
2015). Boundary making refers to the process of
demarcation (Gieryn 1983), by which a profession
distinguishes itself from other professions or non-
professional groups in order to carve out a jurisdic-
tional area for itself in the social space of work.
Boundary blurring refers to the opposite process of
hybridization (Bauböck and Rundell 1998; Liu 2008;
Wimmer 2008), by which a profession seeks to
resemble another profession in order to make the
boundary area between them ambiguous and porous,
sometimes giving birth to hybrid professionals. The
two processes of boundary making and boundary
blurring often coexist in defining the jurisdictional
boundary between two professions.
Boundary making is a social process frequently
observed in the conflict between professional groups.
Scientists seek to distinguish themselves from engi-
neers and clergymen (Gieryn 1983), lawyers from
economists and accountants (Dezalay and Garth
2002, 2004), journalists from editors and bloggers
(Lowrey 2006; Lewis 2012), engineers from techni-
cians and assemblers (Bechky 2003), and so on.
Even for wildland firefighters, Desmond’s (2006)
ethnographic study shows how they construct their
group identity by distinguishing themselves from
urban dwellers and environmentalists. Desmond
uses the concept of habitus (Bourdieu [1979] 1984)
to explain this process of demarcation, but it is argu-
ably a boundary-making process by which firefighters
legitimize their work and occupational identity.
In contrast to the conflictual nature of boundary
making, boundary blurring is generally cooperative, but
it can be conflictual too. This often occurs when a
lower-status profession seeks to expand the market for
its services by entering into the jurisdiction of a higher-
status profession – a process that earlier theorists refer
to as “usurpation” (Larson 1977: 81-82; Macdonald
1995: 131). An example of cooperative boundary blur-
ring is the emergence of intermediate healthcare
professions such as physician’s assistants, nurse practi-
tioners, or health visitors (Sadler, Sadler, and Bliss
1975; Dingwall 1976, 1977), which has blurred the
jurisdictional boundary between doctors and nurses.
An example of conflictual boundary blurring is English
solicitors’ right of audience. Traditionally, solicitors
were required to engage a barrister as advocate in a
High Court. However, they sought the right of audi-
ence in High Courts in the late 20th century and finally
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succeeded under the 1990 Courts and Legal Services
Act (Partington 1991). It is a boundary-blurring proc-
ess that made advocacy a contentious area of work
between the two branches of the English legal
profession.
Another context in which boundary blurring is
frequently observed is the globalization of professio-
nal service firms. Globalization is not only the insti-
tutional diffusion of global norms and the creative
destruction of local practices by global actors (Meyer
et al. 1997; Fourcade 2006; Halliday 2009; Block-
Lieb and Halliday 2017), but also a boundary-
blurring process between the global and the local
(Liu 2008, 2013). When the Big Four accounting
firms and multinational law firms enter a new
national market, they not only introduce the exper-
tise on auditing or corporate law to local companies,
but also integrate elements of local business practice
into their work in order to better serve local clients
and satisfy state regulatory requirements (Hanlon
1994; Silver 2007; Liu 2008; Spence et al. 2017).
Even for less conspicuous professions such as adver-
tising firms, Faulconbridge’s (2006) research shows
that the creation of global spaces of learning is based
on locally embedded practice in multiple geogra-
phies. It is more appropriate to characterize such
global–local interactions as boundary blurring and
hybridization rather than diffusion and creative
destruction because the blurred global–local bounda-
ries are the main sites where expertise is produced
and contested. It is a process characterized by the
simultaneous cooperation and conflict between
global and local professional service firms.
Both boundary making and boundary blurring are
actions by professionals adjacent to the contested
boundary with the aim to gain advantage for their
collective entity in the turf battles over jurisdiction.
The third type of boundary work, boundary mainte-
nance, has a different form. It is not an action

performed by professionals directly involved in a
boundary dispute, but a mediating action (Johnson
1972) made by an external tertius gaudens (Simmel
1950: 154–62), that is, a third actor who has inter-
ests and capacity in mediating the jurisdictional con-
flict between the two professional groups. This third
actor can be a state regulator, a client, or an interna-
tional organization, as long as its interests are at stake
in the boundary dispute.
Boundary maintenance can be either cooperative
or conflictual and it takes a variety of patterns. A state
regulator, for example, can adjust the jurisdictional
boundary between competing professions through
licensing, demand creation, and other regulatory meas-
ures. In Anglo-American countries where professional
self-regulation is the norm, the state often delegates
these regulatory measures to professional associations
(Larson 1977; Abel 1989). In many European and
Asian countries, however, government agencies play
stronger and more direct roles in shaping professional
jurisdictions, including opening and closing bounda-
ries. A good case in point is the mergers of multiple
French legal professions into the avocats in 1971 and
1990, both of which were directly orchestrated by the
French Ministry of Justice (Karpik 1999; Leubsdorf
2001). Even in England, the motherland of Anglo-
American professions, the 2007 Legal Services Act
made by the UK Parliament has significantly weak-
ened the market monopolies of barristers and solici-
tors and led to a drastic re-landscaping of the English
legal profession (Flood 2011).
Yet, boundary maintenance is not always in the
form of an active adjustment of professional bounda-
ries. It also can be a passive process in which the
third actor remains inactive and keeps a stable bal-
ance in the relative strengths of the two competing
professions for its own benefit. The ‘palace wars’
between economists and lawyers in Latin American
states (Dezalay and Garth 2002) demonstrate how
the state can benefit from such interprofessional
struggles. Similarly, in the emergence of the legal
professions in China, the state passively and deliber-
ately maintained a blurred boundary between law-
yers and other legal service providers to maximize its
revenue and political achievements (Liu 2015). As a
result, the jurisdictional conflicts in the legal services
market persisted for decades.
Boundaries and professions  49
In addition to the state, clients, and international
organizations can become actors of boundary mainte-
nance too. The continuous call for multidisciplinary
practice (MDP) between accounting and law since
the 1990s reflects the demands from large corporate
clients for ‘one-stop’ professional service (Dezalay and
Garth 2004). International governance organizations
(e.g., the United Nations) or international financial
institutions (e.g., the World Bank and the
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International Monetary Fund) also frequently engage
in boundary maintenance between professions.
Halliday and Carruthers’s (2007, 2009) research on
bankruptcy and global lawmaking, for instance, shows
how the International Monetary Fund exercised its
power in shaping the global-local boundaries of insol-
vency regimes during the Asian Financial Crisis.
The three processes of boundary making, boun-
dary blurring, and boundary maintenance are not
meant to be an exhaustive typology, yet together they
characterize the dynamics of boundary work by which
professional jurisdictions are constructed and settled.
Boundary making is mostly a conflictual process,
whereas boundary blurring and boundary mainte-
nance can be cooperative or conflictual. Compared to
Abbott’s typology of six jurisdictional settlements, this
typology of boundary work is not only more parsimo-
nious, but also dynamic and flexible enough to
account for a variety of social processes in the con-
struction of professional boundaries. The three proc-
esses of boundary work bear some resemblance to the
exclusionary, demarcationary, or usurpationary strat-
egies of social closure (Macdonald 1995: 131–33) in
the neo-Weberian market control theory, but that
theory’s strong emphasis on monopoly and social clo-
sure (Larson 1977; Saks 2010) neglects the ambiguity
and elasticity of boundary areas between adjacent pro-
fessions as well as the role of external actors (e.g., the
state) in maintaining and adjusting professional
boundaries.
DIAGNOSTIC STRUGGLE AND
COPRODUCTION: THE SOCIAL
CONSTRUCTION OF EXPERTISE
Boundaries are sites of differences, but for the differ-
ences between professional groups to arise and per-
sist, each group must develop a distinctive body of
expertise. Expertise is of vital importance to the
50  S. Liu
formation of a profession because it distinguishes the
profession from both laypersons and other compet-
ing professions in terms of knowledge and skills.
Indeed, ‘no profession delivering bad services can
stand indefinitely against competent outsiders, no
matter how powerful it may be’ (Abbott 1988: 135).
What is the nature of expertise? As many sociolo-
gists have argued (Freidson 1986; Abbott 1988;
Barley 1996; Bechky 2003; Gorman and Sandefur
2011; Azocar and Ferree 2015), expertise is neither
pure academic knowledge nor situational work expe-
rience, but a combination of both. In modern soci-
ety, professionals usually acquire their academic
knowledge from universities and/or professional
schools, but this knowledge does not become exper-
tise until they have accumulated practical experiences
in the workplace. The transformation from academic
knowledge to expertise, or what Freidson (1986)
calls ‘the institutionalization of formal knowledge’,
occurs primarily in the workplaces of professionals,
when they interact with their co-workers, clients,
state regulators, and other actors involved in the
social construction of expertise.
Studying the social construction of expertise,
therefore, begins at the workplaces of professionals.
Abbott (1988: 35–58) proposes a ‘cultural machi-
nery’ of professional work, constituted by three pro-
fessional acts: diagnosis, inference, and treatment.
Despite the medical origin of these concepts, they
constitute a generalizable explanatory framework for
explaining how professional expertise operates in
everyday practice. However, the academic knowledge
system of a profession is largely taken as given in
Abbott’s framework. He recognizes that the power
and prestige of a profession’s academic knowledge
legitimizes its work and sustains its jurisdictions
(Abbott 1988: 52–57) but discusses little on the
social processes by which knowledge systems are
produced and transformed. If we adopt a processual
approach to academic knowledge, then the conflic-
tual or cooperative diagnoses, inferences, and treat-
ments in the production of expertise need to be
theorized before tracing their sequence in the cul-
tural machinery of professional work.
When studying lawmaking, Halliday and his co-
authors modify the concept of diagnosis as a more
dynamic concept: diagnostic struggle (Halliday and
Carruthers 2007; Liu and Halliday 2009; Halliday
2009). Diagnostic struggles involve ‘contests among
actors over diagnoses of problems’ and often rely on
‘different epistemologies championed by competing
professions’ (Halliday 2009: 278). It is through such
struggles over a diagnosis that academic knowledge
is institutionalized and classified into professional
categories. Latour’s (1987) seminal study Science in
Action shows the micro-dynamics of diagnostic strug-
gles in the workplaces of scientists and engineers.
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Even for normative professions such as clergymen or
lawyers, diagnostic struggles over the interpretations
of texts, artifacts, or policy scripts are still at the heart
of their expertise (Halliday 1985; Kentikelenis and
Seabrooke 2017).
But professionals do not always have monopoly
over expertise. In their workplaces, professionals often
compete with clients and the state for control over
diagnoses. Johnson (1972) argues that the producer–
consumer power relationship in professional service
can be controlled by the professional, the client, or
the state, which lead to three corresponding forms of
power relationship: collegiate, patronage, and media-
tion. In both patronage and mediation, the professio-
nal, as the primary producer of professional service, is
less powerful than the client (consumer) or the state
(regulator). Accordingly, the social construction of
expertise is strongly shaped by either client demand
or state mediation, or both.
The profession–client or profession–state interac-
tions concerning diagnosis are not always competi-
tive or conflictual. They can be cooperative too. In a
recent article, Eyal (2013) argues that the sociology
of professions focuses on jurisdictional struggles
among experts but it treats expertise as an attribution
or a substantive skill that experts possess. In contrast,
he advocates for a sociology of expertise that concep-
tualizes expertise ‘as a network connecting together
not only the putative experts but also other actors,
including clients and patients, devices and instru-
ments, concepts, and institutional and spatial
arrangements’, which is suitable for both ‘an ethno-
graphic analysis of expert work practices’ and ‘a his-
torical genealogy of how a form of expertise
emerged’ (Eyal 2013: 873). Using the case of autism,
Eyal demonstrates how the deinstitutionalization of
mental retardation created a social space in which
professionals (psychologists and therapists) and

laypersons (parents of autistic children) worked
together to constitute a network of expertise.
Eyal’s understanding of the relationship between
expertise and professions is puzzling and problematic
because the sociology of professions has provided
many conceptual tools for theorizing expertise, not
limited to Abbott’s diagnosis-inference-treatment
framework discussed above (e.g., Dingwall and Lewis
1983; Star and Griesemer 1989; Sarat and Felstiner
1995; Flood 2013). Although an actor-network
approach (Latour 2005) has rarely been adopted, the
relationship between professionals and external
actors, particularly clients, is one of the most
researched topics in the sociology of professions
(Parsons 1939; Johnson 1972; Heinz and Laumann
1982; Sarat and Felstiner 1995; Heritage and
Maynard 2006). The ‘devices and instruments’ as
well as ‘institutional and spatial arrangements’ that
Eyal emphasizes as unique components of the sociol-
ogy of expertise have also been closely studied and
theorized as ‘boundary objects’ or ‘workplace arti-
facts’ (Star and Griesemer 1989; Bechky 2003). To
claim that expertise is outside the realm of the sociol-
ogy of professions reveals Eyal’s serious misunder-
standing of the Chicago School of work and
occupations, which has consistently argued that the
professions must be studied and theorized by exam-
ining professional work and how work is organized
and controlled (Becker 1970; Hughes 1971, 1994;
Freidson 1970, 1986; Abbott 1988).
Eyal’s study of autism is arguably an exceptional
case rather than a new paradigm for the sociology of
professions. Yet, it still yields important insights. In
this case, professional and lay diagnoses do not com-
pete for dominance but form a cooperative network
(Eyal 2013: 875–6)—a process that I call diagnostic
coproduction. In his earlier book on expertise in Arab
affairs, Eyal (2006) also shows how the diagnostic
struggle and coproduction among academics, intelli-
gence, immigrants, and others shape the hybridization
and purification of orientalist expertise in the forma-
tion of the Israeli state. Despite its Foucauldian and
Latourian origins, Eyal’s approach to expertise has
much in common with the interactionist approach of
the Chicago School, particularly Hughes (1971,
1994), who argues that occupations emerge from bun-
dles of work activities and are parts within larger sys-
tems of work. Each profession seeks a monopoly, and
Boundaries and professions  51
‘it does so in part by limiting its activities and the area
of its responsibilities and tasks, while delegating pur-
posely or by default many related tasks and responsi-
bilities to other occupations’ (Hughes 1994: 71).
The conceptual shift from diagnosis to diagnostic
struggle and coproduction enables us to understand
the social construction of expertise not as a mechani-
cal sequence of colligation and classification (Abbott
1988: 41), but as an open and dynamic process that
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can occur between practitioners in the same profes-
sion, between practitioners in different professions,
and between professionals and their clients or regula-
tors, in both local contexts and transnational profes-
sional ecologies (Stone 2013; Seabrooke 2014;
Seabrooke and Tsingou 2015; Block-Lieb and
Halliday 2017). Theoretically, it is also possible to
discuss ‘treatment coproduction’ or ‘inference strug-
gles’ in professional work. However, conflict and
cooperation over expertise occur more prominently
in the diagnostic process because inference and treat-
ment can only be made on the basis of a legitimate
diagnosis in the first place.
Diagnostic struggle and coproduction over exper-
tise are social processes within and across boundaries
because they do not engage explicitly in turf battles
over jurisdiction (i.e., boundary work) but negotiate
both intraprofessional and interprofessional bounda-
ries by constituting the cultural substance of profes-
sional work. For many individual professionals, the
primary allies and opponents of their diagnoses in
the workplace are other practitioners in the same
profession. Yet, these struggles and coproduction
also occur across professional boundaries, such as
the competing diagnoses of a financial crisis between
economists and lawyers (Halliday and Carruthers
2009), or the cooperative diagnoses of autism
between psychologists and lay parents (Eyal 2013).
Diagnostic struggle and coproduction are not endog-
enous processes that exclude external actors such as
the client or the state. Instead, they permeate
through boundaries of work and build the cultural
heartland of professional expertise.
EXCHANGE: THE MAINTENANCE OF
SOCIAL NETWORKS
Professionals develop expertise and fight for jurisdic-
tions in the social space of work, but they also build
52  S. Liu
networks to consolidate the profession and facilitate
their everyday work. The exchange of resources
within and across professional boundaries is the key
social process for the maintenance of social networks
(Lazega 2001; Liu 2011; Helgadóttir 2016).
Exchange can occur between practitioners in the
same profession, between different professions,
between professions and clients, between professions
and the state, and so on. It does not demarcate or
blur jurisdictional boundaries but facilitates the flow
of power, capital, and other resources between two
or more actors within or across boundaries (Homans
1958; Blau [1964] 1986; Emerson 1976; Cook and
Emerson 1978). To bring exchange to the forefront
of the study of professions is to remedy a notable
weakness in Abbott’s (1988) system of professions,
that is, it overemphasizes ‘competition as the overrid-
ing dynamic’ (Johnson 1989: 413) at the expense of
other more cooperative and interdependent social
processes that shape professional life.
Professionals are not lone rangers working in
their protected territories. They are embedded in
complex social networks and their actions always
involve exchange with other social actors. Adam
Smith’s classic account of human beings’ ‘propensity
to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’
([1776] 1976: 17) is what gives rise to the division
of labor and the formation of markets and occupa-
tions. Simmel (1971: 43) conceives exchange as ‘the
purest and most concentrated form of all human
interactions in which serious interests are at stake.’
At the heart of the concept of exchange is the expect-
ation of rewarding reactions from others (Blau
[1964] 1986: 91). The ‘rewards’ involved in
exchange could be money, nonmonetary capital and
resources, or even love, trust, and other emotions. It
is inherently ‘a two-sided, mutually contingent, and
mutually rewarding process’ (Emerson 1976: 336).
Molm (2003) distinguishes between two basic
forms of direct exchange, namely, negotiated
exchange and reciprocal exchange. Negotiated
exchange is a joint decision process in which two
actors engage in ‘a discrete, bilateral transaction that
gives each partner benefits of equal or unequal value’
(Molm 2003: 2). Reciprocal exchange is initiated by
one actor’s performance of ‘a beneficial act for
another without knowing whether, when, or to what
extent the other will reciprocate’ (Molm 2003: 3).
If the other actor performs a reciprocal act, it com-
pletes one exchange and initiates another. By defini-
tion, negotiated exchanges are discrete or even
instant events, whereas reciprocal exchange proceeds
in an incremental manner. Trust, emotional attach-
ment, and structural interdependence between actors
are all important in the maintenance of reciprocal
exchange. For negotiated exchange, however, the
dynamics of interaction are governed more by
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rational choice and often involve higher use of power
(Molm, Peterson, and Takahashi 1999).
Both negotiated and reciprocal exchanges are
widely observed in professional life. Two scientists
collaborate in a research project engage in negotiated
exchanges of their respective expertise, funding, and
other resources. In producing a film, the director
makes negotiated exchanges with the producers and
actors through contracts and daily collaborations.
Yet, professional collaborations are not always dis-
crete events. A professor may train her graduate stu-
dents for years without expecting any immediate
reciprocating action from them. Once those students
become scholars, however, their former supervisor
would often benefit from the regular use of her work
in their research and teaching, as well as opportuni-
ties of research collaboration. The continuous and
enduring nature of reciprocal exchange is clearly
observed in this case. Another common example of
exchange in professional life is the referral system
frequently used in many professions, including law-
yers and doctors. Such referrals can be either negoti-
ated or reciprocal. Lazega’s (2001) social network
analysis of a large New England law firm illustrates
how the exchange among lawyers drives the status
competition and structural differentiation within the
firm.
Exchange is not only observed in the cooperative
interactions between practitioners in the same pro-
fession. It is also equally important for interactions
across professional boundaries. Engineers and tech-
nicians (Bechky 2003), politicians and lobbyists
(Heinz et al. 1993), lawyers and accountants
(Dezalay and Garth 2004), biologists and museum
collectors (Star and Griesemer 1989), journalists and
bloggers (Lowrey 2006; Lewis 2012)—these adja-
cent professionals not only fight for jurisdictions
through boundary work, but also exchange resources
with one another. Similar patterns of exchange can

also be observed between a professional and her cli-
ent or state regulator. The flow of power and resour-
ces through the revolving doors between lawyers and
in-house counsel (Nelson and Nielsen 2000; Wilkins
2012) or between investment bankers and financial
regulators are good cases in point.
The emergence of such cooperative and interde-
pendent relations in professional work can be the
result of negotiated or reciprocal exchange.
However, once they become relatively stable, the
two actors form an institutionalized processual form
that I refer to as symbiotic exchange, in which both
actors become highly interdependent and mutually
structuring in the continuous process of exchange
(Liu 2011, 2015). Symbiotic exchange describes not
only a social process, but also its structural conse-
quences to the two actors involved in it. In compari-
son to some earlier concepts for characterizing the
profession–client or profession–state relations, such
as Johnson’s (1972) concepts of patronage and
mediation, symbiotic exchange is a more dynamic
and generalizable concept that can be used to explain
various patterns of collaboration between professio-
nals and the ‘significant others’ (Hanlon 1997; Liu
2011) in their work. It is through symbiotic exchange
that many social networks in professional life are
established and maintained over time.
In sum, exchange is the primary process of inte-
gration in professional life and it gives rise to the
relationality of professional work (Harrington 2015).
To survive and succeed in their work, professionals
must build bridges within and across jurisdictional
boundaries and form symbiotic relationships with
colleagues, collaborators, clients, state officials, and
other relevant actors through negotiated, reciprocal,
or symbiotic exchange. Exchange is a boundary proc-
ess because it helps maintain the elasticity of profes-
sional boundaries by enabling the adjacent
professional and non-professional actors to cooper-
ate with one another, which makes the boundary
between them not a sharp line of demarcation but an
elastic area in which conflict and cooperation coexist
(Liu 2015). Arguably, actors also engage in competi-
tion within and across boundaries, but the coopera-
tive logic of exchange is of greater importance in
maintaining professional networks and facilitating
resource flows between them. More attention on
exchange in future research would compensate the
Boundaries and professions  53
overemphasis on competition and monopoly in
existing theories of the professions (e.g., Larson
1977; Abbott 1988).
THE PROBLEMS OF ORDER AND CHANGE
An enduring legacy of the Chicago School interac-
tionist tradition is the conceptualization of society as
collective action and the rejection of the dualisms
between individual and society and between macro-
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and micro-levels of analysis (Strauss 1993; Abbott
2016). In Becker’s (1970: v) words, ‘any talks of
structures or factors in the end refer to some notions
of people doing things together, which is what soci-
ology studies.’ Following this tradition, I have out-
lined a processual theory of action for the sociology
of professions by examining three types of boundary
processes in professional life: boundary work, diag-
nosis, and exchange. All these boundary processes
start from the social interactions between individual
professionals and other actors in the boundary areas
that constitute professions and then derive the col-
lective forms of jurisdictions, expertise, and networks
from such interactions. In this final section, I provide
some thoughts on how such a theory of professional
action complements or challenges existing theories
of professional order and change.
For the problem of order, the conceptual change
from ‘boundaries of professions’ to ‘professions of
boundaries’ is not merely a metaphorical shift. It has
important consequences for understanding the social
space of work. The processual theory of professional
action traces both the social construction of work
(i.e., diagnostic struggle and coproduction) and the
conflictual or cooperative relations that professionals
and other actors build around areas of work (i.e.,
boundary work and exchange). It presents the land-
scape of the ecological system of professions not as a
flat competitive space (Abbott 1988), but as a multi-
layered space with cultural heartlands, barriers, and
bridges. It is also an ecology open to the links and
overlaps with other ecologies through boundary
processes (Abbott 2005; Liu 2017).
The processual theory of action also provides an
answer to the problem of ‘oligarchy’ in the system of
professions (Abbott 1988: 167–76), that is, some
dominant professions often care more about intra-
professional dynamics rather than interprofessional
54  S. Liu
competition after they have well established their
jurisdictions in the division of labor. However, if we
examine the interactions between professions in
terms of boundary work, diagnostic struggle/copro-
duction, and exchange rather than the unitary proc-
ess of jurisdictional conflict, then it is evident that
even the most established professions such as doc-
tors and lawyers still constantly engage in interac-
tional processes regarding expertise, jurisdictions,
and networks with other professions, their clients,
state regulators, and other social actors. Professional
dominance, in other words, does not necessarily
reduce the scope and intensity of social interactions
around professional boundaries.
What are the implications of the processual
theory of action for understanding social change in
professional life? Unlike the earlier paradigm of pro-
fessionalization (Wilensky 1964; Larson 1977),
which focuses on the structural aspects of professio-
nal life such as licensing and association, my theory
conceptualizes professional development as driven
by social processes within, over, and across bounda-
ries. Following this new perspective, professional
associations are not fixed organizational entities
wielding educational and regulatory power, but the
outcomes of the collective action of professionals
seeking to manage the boundaries between their pro-
fession and the social world outside. Similarly, pro-
fessional licensing systems are the outcomes of
boundary making and boundary maintenance aiming
at demarcation. Shifting the attention from structure
to process would enable professionalization to have
‘a history of its own’ (Abbott 1988: 19) and thus
make the concept more adaptable to the changing
conditions of professional development across social
contexts. Furthermore, the processual theory of
action also transcends the opposing assumptions of
professional self-interest or altruism between
monopolist and functional theories (Parsons 1939;
Larson 1977). If all professions are the outcomes of
collective action, then it makes more sense to exam-
ine the various processes of interaction between indi-
vidual professionals than to make arbitrary
assumptions on the collective motivation of the pro-
fession as a whole.
Although the processual theory of professional
action puts much emphasis on the importance of
micro-interactions, it is not a rational-choice theory
that exaggerates the agency of individual actors.
Instead, it seeks to remedy the notable weakness on
social action in existing theories of the professions
and bridge the conceptual barrier between interac-
tions and structures in professional life. The collec-
tive action of purposive actors creates social
boundaries, and those boundaries constitute profes-
sions. However, as soon as boundary processes start
to create social structures, these structures also begin
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to exercise constraints on individual action. In this
sense, the relationship between boundaries and pro-
fessions is mutually constitutive, and the ‘professions
of boundaries’ approach must be complemented by a
structural theory of order and change, on which
existing theories (Parsons 1939; Larson 1977;
Abbott 1988; Saks 2016) have offered many insights.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author thanks Robert Dingwall, Terence C. Halliday,
Daniel A. Menchik, Erik Olin Wright, and anonymous
reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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