Professions in periods of social change: the case of architectural discourse and design Hadas Shadar a,b and Zvika Orr c a The Interdisciplinary Program for Urban Engineering and The Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel; b Department of Architecture, NB Haifa School of Design, Haifa, Israel; c Faculty of Life and Health Sciences, Jerusalem College of Technology, Jerusalem, Israel ABSTRACT This article examines how professions behave in periods of social change. The article considers whether professions take positions vis-à-vis broader social discourse, and explores the relationship between the professions’ positions and those of the government. The article examines these questions through the case of the Israeli architectural profession’s behavior after the 1967 war in both the newly occupied territories, over which Israeli control is under dispute among Israeli Jews, as well as the pre-1967 areas, in which Israeli sovereignty enjoys a consensus among Israeli Jews. The article traces both design and construction activities, as well as the discourse that followed in their wake. The article’s conclusion is that changes in professional discourse are a way to understand the profession’s position regarding a given set of social changes. We argue that the transition from an inward- facing professional discourse to an outward-facing professional discourse that addresses the larger society is both an indication of that profession’s condition as well as the condition of the social group to which it belongs. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 4 February 2017 Accepted 31 July 2017 KEYWORDS Professions; architecture; social change; professional discourse; Israeli society Introduction The professions and the state A profession is a vocational field that enjoys special status, one that allows the profession to control its own content. Professions have an exclusive right to engage in certain kinds of work. They control the official training process that practitioners must undergo in order to do that work, the ways in which new members are admitted into the profession, the defi- nition and characteristics of each profession’s vocational field, the standards according to which the quality of the relevant product or service is determined, the professional norms and ethical rules and the evaluation of work performance. Each profession accumulates knowledge, prestige and power that help it achieve autonomy and a monopoly on its voca- tional fields (Abbott, 1988; Evetts, 2003, 2013; Freidson, 1970, 2001; Macdonald, 1995). As such, the ideology, norms and belief system that professions produce may be viewed as a strategy for preserving their power and status within the larger society (Freidson, 1970). © 2017 University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ CONTACT Hadas Shadar hadass2@013.net Department of Architecture, NB Haifa School of Design, 21 Haganim St., Haifa 3200003, Israel INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY—REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SOCIOLOGIE, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2017.1366047 Downloaded by [UC Berkeley Library] at 22:22 28 August 2017