Closure in the elite professions: the field of law and medicine in an egalitarian context

Abstract

This article examines if and how the elite professions of law and medicine have managed to maintain their exclusivity in a period of educational expansion in Norway. The extent to which these professions disproportionately recruit students with socio-economically advantageous backgrounds is seen as an indication of intergenerational closure. Using registry data covering the entire population of Norway over a 26-year time span, we show that even though these two professions have experienced growing numbers of candidates, they manage, partly due to different institutional strategies, to maintain their exclusivity. Parents’ income and self-recruitment are relatively stable and important factors for the recruitment in both fields, although these trends are somewhat higher in law than in medicine. Drawing on Turner’s (1960) ideal-typical concepts of contest and sponsor mobility, we pinpoint institutional differences between the types of education provided for both groups and how these have adapted to meet the expansion in candidates seeking to qualify as lawyers and doctors.

Keywords:

• Social closure
• self-recruitment
• elite professions
• inequality
• contest mobility
• sponsor mobility

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited from the input of the members of two seminars at the University of Oslo and Centre for the Study of Professions at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. Earlier drafts of this paper have been presented at the conference ‘Knowledge, Status and Power. Elite education, training and expertise’ in Paris in the fall of 2014, and at the RC28-conference ‘Social Inequality, Cohesion and Solidarity’ in Tilburg in the spring of 2015. We are also grateful to the participants of the workshop ‘Occupational regulation. Recruitment and income inequality’ at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. Thanks also to the editors of this volume and two anonymous referees for helpful feedback. The data used are kindly provided by Statistic Norway (SSB) for the project Educational Careers at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo.