Symposium Ferment in Professional Associations Jonathan B. Imber and Irving Louis Horowitz T he American ideology is forged in the trenches of American professional associations--those clusters of scientists, technicians, historians and so- cial scientists presumably responsible for moving the national consciousness beyond ideology. The articles included in this symposium observe and dissect the present debates within various professional associa- tions in America. Such associations have never been without controversy; they have come into existence and fractured as a result of many factors intrinsic to the life of a discipline as well as many that are extrin- sic and a part of the life of the society. As a result, it is important to consider the routinization of certain types of their activities, including bringing together large numbers of specialists within particular disciplines and providing assistance in job placement. The lives of many professions, especially those under consideration here, are linked to the character and quality of higher education. At the same time, the economic needs and desires of members drive the entire bundle. In previous decades, the economies of scale in many of these associations promoted exclusively the report- ing and discussion of research. Unlike medical soci- eties, the professional societies of the humanities and social sciences for the most part do not provide credit hours toward further professional certification. By at- taching itself to precisely medical and therapeutic goals, psychology has developed legitimization through licensing. However, in the absence of evidence of contribution to the therapeutic state, disciplines like sociology that have attempted licensing programs have either failed or such licenses have simply become an ancillary reward of professional membership. None- theless, professional meetings provide a less expen- sive way to screen many job candidates in one place at one time as well as to garner a certain amount of attention in the major print media. The umbilical cord between ideology, politics, and work is both the ce- ment holding professions together and the ferment driving them toward fragmentation. The tendency to regard the business of professional associations in terms that go well beyond the expecta- tions of reporting research and conducting reasonable debate has created, among some, an advocacy of the discipline as an interest group. There has been con- siderable reaction against this by those who view the discipline as a disinterested group of specialists. When the process of politicization is referred to in the con- text of the organization and thrust of professional meetings, the central problem is one about the sensi- bilities and aims of those charged with leading and administering these meetings. The case of the American Sociological Association (ASA) illustrates the conflicting tendencies in an el- liptical yet compelling way. The New York Times re- ported on a session at the August 1998 ASA meetings in San Francisco on the sociology of jazz. One nov- elty was that participants performed jazz during the session. As one moment in a meeting with hundreds of sessions, large and small, a major newspaper saw an opportunity to report on the intellectual and cul- tural interests of several older professional sociolo- gists. The newspaper account was something of a throwback to those days when certain light-heartedness and intellectual integrity were mutually reinforcing aspects of the same professional goals. Another ses- sion, reported on in The Chronicle of Higher Educa- tion, described the findings of two researchers, Douglas Downey and Stefanie Neubauer, about the exception Mormons represent to the rule that the larger the family, the less well children do educationally. Downey was reported to have said that he "believes