Idealistic recruits once pressed professions toward serving the poor and respecting client autonomy.

Evidence

During the 1960s the service occupations and professions appeared to experience a degree of revitalization as an influx of idealistic recruits joined with like-minded members of the profession to dedicate themselves to practices based on different principles from those that were dominant at the time. These principles included placing their skills in the service of those people who most needed them (the poor, ethnic, and racial minorities), committing themselves to respecting client autonomy, turning the power of the professions to helping achieve greater social and economic justice, and eschewing personal status enhancement when it conflicted with these principles. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1473

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to histories of the 1960s service-profession movements (legal services, community health, welfare rights) and to later critiques of their institutional absorption. — connects to: LSC lawyers justify political litigation as serving the poor community’s interests. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 763