Special Issue of the Sociology of Development on Professionals and the Professions in the Developing World

Nitsan Chorev and Andrew Schrank, Brown University, Editors

Professionals and the professions loom large in developing societies and are indispensable to the development process. Schools need teachers, hospitals need doctors, industrialization involves engineers, democracies depend on journalists, and the rule of law presupposes lawyers, to cite but a few of the most obvious examples. But the sociological literature on the professions is at best parochial, and developing country professionals therefore enter contemporary sociology less as members of coherent professions than as peripheral actors in larger processes (e.g., education, mortality decline, industrialization, democratization, etc.).

To address this gap, we are soliciting contributions to a special issue of the Sociology of Development (http://socdev.ucpress.edu/) on “professionals and the professions in the developing world.” Papers that explore the origins, organization, and/or impacts of professionals and the professions in the contemporary Global South or historical developing societies are particularly welcome.

Please submit a 1-page abstract no later than December 1, 2015.

We hope to have a two-day conference at Brown University in the fall of 2016 (pending funding), in which authors of selected submissions will
present drafts of their papers before the initiation of the formal peer review process.

Please send abstracts (or any questions you might have) to:
Nitsan Chorev (nitsan_chorev@brown.edu) and
Andrew Schrank (andrew_schrank@brown.edu)