‘Give Professionalization a Chance!’ Why Management Consulting May Yet Become a Full Profession

In 1906, a little more than a century ago, the American Academy of Political and Social Science published a special issue of their journal, The Annals, on the topic of the ‘Business Professions’. Leading academics and practitioners contributed nearly a dozen articles chronicling the rise of the new business professions, including accounting, actuarial science, public relations, and scientific research. Although management consulting (or ‘management engineering’ as it was known then) did not appear among the emerging specializations that they profiled, another contender for professionalization, journalism, was prominently featured. George Washington Ochs, the former Mayor of Chattanooga whose brother owned The New York Times, wrote about the ongoing attempt to professionalize journalism from his vantage point as publisher of the Philadelphia Public Ledger (Diamond, 1993). That said, Ochs was far from convinced that specialized training or formal qualifications were a prerequisite to the training of the best young writers, arguing that often ‘specialization is a drawback’ in the education of journalists (Ochs, 1906: 52). Or as a contemporary sociologist summarized the perspective of the many skeptics who doubted that journalism was a natural candidate for professional status, ‘journalism has no clearly defined, conventional technique analogous to that of law or medicine’ (Vincent, 1905: 298).