State and professions : a study of lawyers and doctors in reform China

Abstract

This dissertation adopts an institutionalist paradigm to examme the relationship between the state and the lawyers and doctors in reform China. It seeks to explain the two professions' differing courses of professionalization in terms of their evolving relationship with the state over the past two decades by looking at the macro, meso, and micro institutional environments in which lawyers and doctors are located in the reform era. It argues that there is no linear relationship between economic development and professional development. The favorable conditions opened up for the professions at the macro level are essentially mediated by the different constellations of state interests at the meso level. As a result of the historical past in the legal and medical sectors, the state imposed differing logics in the institutionalization of law and medicine in the reform era. This shaped concrete reform polices at the micro level, particularly in the arenas of education and professional practice, and this in tum presented different institutional opportunities and constraints for lawyers and doctors to act upon and different niches from within which they could gain different senses of being a "profession". The dissertation argues that professionalization in China must be understood in such an interlocking institutional complexity, and that the interests and actions of actors, including both the state and professions, must be interpreted in terms of their institutional embeddedness.