Professional Autonomy: A Framework for Empirical Research1

Employed professionals (e.g., accountants or engineers)—and those who study them—sometimes claim that their status as employees denies them the “autonomy†necessary to be “true professionals.†Is this a conceptual claim or an empirical claim? How might it be proved or disproved? This paper draws on recent work on autonomy to try to answer these questions. In the course of doing that, it identifies three literatures concerned with autonomy and suggests an approach bringing them together in a way likely to be useful both to philosophers interested in the concept and to social scientists interested in studying autonomy in the workplace.