7 - Professionals, power and prestige

Summary

The principal aim of this chapter is to examine the power relations enabling and constraining professional action in Poland especially and Soviet-type society generally. Because the authorities control opportunities for professional work in this system, professionalism depends to some degree on political qualifications. Professionals also control resources, especially through their monopoly over forms of specialized knowledge. But their power in dealing both with authorities and with other social groups comes in the prestige associated with that monopoly. In Soviet-type society, this prestige can influence the authorities’ delegation of power and privilege, but under conditions of economic and social crisis, professionals are likely to lose some of their perquisites. Professionals thus are normally “dependent” on the authorities, but in exceptional periods they can transfer their allegiance and become “dependent” on other social groups. In the Solidarity period, professionals were dependent on the self-organized working class.

When one writes of the highly educated in Eastern Europe, one normally writes of the intelligentsia, not of professionals. To use “professionals” in the title of this volume therefore suggests a distance from the normal Eastern European discourse. My terminological alteration reflects an intentional departure from this portion of the Eastern European analytical framework. Use of the term “intelligentsia” would divert me from my principal concern with the Soviet-type system of power relations, and direct me toward questions of the cultural identity and moral evaluation of one group.