PROFESSIONAL ETHICS AS AN OBJECT OF SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY: BETWEEN SOCIOLOGY OF MORALITY AND SOCIOLOGY OF PROFESSIONS

Abstract

The article presents the results of the analysis of classical and contemporary theories and approaches to the study of professional ethics. In the first part of the article, based on the ideas of H. Spencer, E. Durkheim and T. Parsons, the authors question the general sociological interpretation of the nature of professional ethics mainly in its functionalist perspective. According to Spencer, professions play an important moral role in social development such as improving the quality of life. Durkheim believed that professional ethics should contribute to solidarity and prevent labor and commercial conflicts, which can be facilitated by the restoration of guilds in a renewed form - as institutionalized moral regulators. Parsons conducted a theoretical analysis of medical ethics to emphasize the presence of prestigious professional positions based on altruistic values in capitalist societies. In the second part of the article, the authors prove that professional ethics was studied in Soviet and Russian sociology although in general it is represented rather poorly with the exception of works by A.V. Yadov, Yu.V. Sogomonov, E.A. Grishin and V.I. Bakshtanovsky, who emphasized practical aspects of the ethical actions of professionals. Today, the dispositional theory of personality developed by a group of researchers led by Yadov needs to be reinterpreted to take into account emotional and ethical components of professional work. Nevertheless, Russian authors developed an original theory of professional ethics as a special type of applied ethics, showed its purpose and criticized its social-philosophical models. The article presents an overview of contemporary Russian publications on sociology of professions, which allows to state a low interest in issues of professional ethics although most of the works mention “codes of professional ethics” as a mandatory attribute of professionalism. Despite the developed tradition of research in this field, the western sociology of professions is captured by functionalist and critical interpretations of professional ethics and rarely goes beyond the practical aspects of assessing the role of ethics in the actions of professionals.

Keywords

• professions
• ethics
• professional ethics
• sociology of morality
• sociology of professions
• sociological theory
• morality
• norms