The Paradox of Professionalism

?Kirschner, here treats public-service professionals--social workers, public health personnel, city planners, and architects. Interested not in what these professionals did but in what they thought, Kirschner presents an intellectual history of the professionalization of reform. Uncomfortable with the representative figures approach, he eschews the personal and private writings of leading professionals. Instead, Kirschner uses papers presented at annual meetings, professional journals, and such nonprofessional periodicals as National Municipal Review and The Survey to show the opinions of leaders and second-echelon figures alike. Beset by tensions and ambiguities, the reformers pursued an erratic course. Kirschner tracks them doggedly from the Progressive Era, when they established their credentials and were both fervent and united; through the 1920s, when they lost their enthusiasm, and followed a narrow, even trivial paths; to the New Deal years, when they rediscovered their faith. At the end, however, the public-service professionals confronted a dilemma--how to create community feeling without centralized subsidies and accompanying centralized control. Endnotes; bibliographical essay; index. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty who have a serious interest in 20th-century urban America will want to read this informative and thoughtful work.?-Choice