Editing Guild (section)

== Modern guilds ==
[[Profession]]al organizations replicate guild structure and operation.<ref name=":0" /> Professions such as architecture, engineering, geology, and land surveying require varying lengths of apprenticeships before one can gain a "professional" certification. These certifications hold great legal weight: most states make them a prerequisite to practicing there.{{citation needed|date=June 2022}}

Though most guilds died off by the middle of the nineteenth century, quasi-guilds persist today, primarily in the fields of law, medicine, engineering, and academia.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Krause |first=Elliot |title=Death of Guilds:Professions, States, and The Advance of Capitalism, 1930 to The Present |publisher=Yale University Press, New Haven and London |year=1996}}</ref> Paralleling or soon after the fall of guilds in Britain and in the United States professional associations began to form. In America a number of interested parties sought to emulate the model of apprenticeship which European guilds of the Middle Ages had honed to achieve their ends of establishing exclusivity in trades<ref name=":1">{{Cite book |last=Ogilvie |first=Sheilagh |title=The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis |publisher=Princeton University Press |year=2019}}</ref><ref name=":2">{{Cite book |last=Starr |first=Paul |title=The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry |publisher=Basic Books, Inc., New York |year=1982}}</ref> as well as the English concept of a gentleman which had come to be associated with higher income and craftsmanship<ref>{{Cite book |last=Perkin |first=Harold |title=The Rise of Professional Society; England since 1885 |publisher=Routledge, London and New York |year=1993}}</ref><ref name=":0" /><ref>{{Cite book |last=Miller |first=Lillian |title=The Lazzaroni: Science and Scientists in The Mid Nineteenth Century America |publisher=Smithsonian Institution Press |year=1972}}</ref>

Licensing and accreditation practices which typically result from the lobbying of [[professional]] associations constitute the modern equivalent of a 'guild-privilege', albeit in contrast to guilds of the Middle Ages which held a letters patent which explicitly granted them monopolies on the provision of services, today's quasi-guild privileges are subtler, more complex, and less ''directly'' restrictive to consumers in their nature.

Nevertheless, it can be argued quasi-guild privileges are in many cases designed not just to serve some notion of public good, but to facilitate the establishing and maintaining of exclusivity in a field of work.

There are often subtle dichotomies present in attempting to answer the question of whether modern licensing and accreditation practices are intended to serve the public good, however it be defined. For medieval guilds this dichotomy is exemplified by differing explanations of the same phenomena; of limiting work hours among guild members. [[Sheilagh Ogilvie]] argues that this was intended to mitigate competition among guild members,<ref name=":1" /> while Dorothy Terry argues this was to prevent guild members from working late into the night while tired and when lighting is poor and therefore producing low quality work.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Terry |first=Dorothy |title=Guilds in The Middle Agese |publisher=Batoche Books |year=2000}}</ref> In modern times, while licensing practices are usually argued to in some way protect members of the public (e.g. by ensuring quality standards), it usually can also be argued that these practices have been engineered to limit the number of 'outsiders' who gain entrance to a given field.

As argued by [[Paul Starr]] and [[Ronald Hamowy]], both of whose focus is on the development of medicine in America, the tying of medical licensing practices to universities was a process intended to do more than protect the public from 'quackery', but was engineered to be unnecessarily prolonged, inefficient, and a costly process so as to deter 'outsiders' from getting into the field, thereby enhancing the prestige and earning power of medical professionals.<ref name=":2" /><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Hamowy |first=Ronald |date=1978 |title=The Early Development of Medical Licensing Laws in the United States, 1875-1900* |url=https://cdn.mises.org/3_1_5_0.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201024112404/https://cdn.mises.org/3_1_5_0.pdf |archive-date=2020-10-24 |url-status=live |journal=Deportment of History, University of Alberta}}</ref>

The university system in general continues to serve as a basis upon which modern quasi-guilds operate in the form of professionalism. 'Universitas' in the Middle Ages meant a society of masters who had the capacity for self-governance, and this term was adopted by students and teachers who came together in the twelfth century to form scholars guilds.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Davidson |first=Thomas |title=A History of Education |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons, New York |year=1900}}</ref> Though guilds mostly died off by the middle of the nineteenth century, the scholars guild persisted due to its peripheral nature to an industrialized economy. In the words of Elliot Krause,<blockquote>"The university and scholars' guilds held onto their power over membership, training, and workplace because early capitalism was not interested in it (there was no product that the capitalist wished to produce)...the cultural prestige of knowledge itself helped keep the scholars' guild and the university alive while all other guilds failed."

- Elliot Krause, ''The Death of Guilds'' (1996)</blockquote>Though in theory anyone can start a college, the 'privilege' in this case is the linking of federal aid to accreditation. While accreditation of a university is entirely optional, attending an accredited university is a prerequisite to receiving federal aid, and this has a powerful influence on limiting consumer options in the field of education as it provides a mechanism to limit entrepreneurial 'outsiders' from entering the field of education. George Leef and Roxana Burris study the accreditation system for which they observe is 'highly collegial' and potentially bias in the fact that accreditation review is performed by members of schools who will in turn be reviewed by many of the same people who they have reviewed.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Leef |first=George C.  |last2=Burris |first2=Roxana D. |date=July 1, 2002 |title=Can College Accreditation Live Up to Its Promise? |url=https://www.goacta.org/resource/can_college_accreditation_live_up_to_its_promise/ |access-date=2022-05-22 |website=American Council of Trustees and Alumni |language=en-US}}</ref> They further question the effectiveness of the methods involved in accreditation,<blockquote>"Although accreditation is usually justified as a means of giving students and parents an assurance of educational quality, it is important to note that the accreditors do not endeavor to assess the quality of individual programs or departments.... The accreditation system is not based on an evaluation of the results of an institution, but rather upon an evaluation of its inputs and processes. If the inputs and processes look good, acceptable educational quality is assumed. It is as if an organization decided which automobiles would be allowed to be sold by checking to make sure that each car model had tires, doors, an engine and so forth and had been assembled by workers with proper training—but without actually driving any cars"

- George C. Leef and Roxana D. Burris, ''Can College Accreditation Live Up To Its Promise?''</blockquote>Taken in the context of guilds, it can be argued that the purpose of accreditation is to provide a mechanism for members of the scholars guild to protect itself, both by limiting outsiders from entering the field and by enforcing established norms onto one another. Contriving means to limit the number of outsiders who gain an entrance to a field (exclusivity) and to enforce work norms among members were both distinguishing feature of guilds in the Middle Ages.<ref name=":1" />

=== Quasi-guilds in the information economy ===
In 1998, [[Thomas W. Malone]] championed a modern variant of the guild structure for [[independent contractor]]s and [[remote work]]ers. [[Insurance]] including any professional [[legal liability]], [[intellectual capital]] protections, an [[ethical code]] perhaps enforced by peer pressure and software, and other benefits of a strong association of producers of knowledge, benefit from [[economies of scale]], and may prevent cut-throat competition that leads to inferior services undercutting prices. As with historical guilds, such a structure will resist foreign competition.<ref>{{Cite magazine |last=SCHWARTZ |first=PETER |date=July 1, 1998 |title=Re-Organization Man |magazine=[[Wired (magazine)|Wired]] |url=https://www.wired.com/1998/07/malone/ |url-access=limited}}</ref>

The [[open-source-software movement]] has from time to time explored a guild-like structure to unite against competition from [[Microsoft]], e.g. [[Advogato]] assigns journeyer and master ranks to those committing to work only or mostly on free software.<ref>{{Cite magazine |last=METZ |first=CADE |date=September 16, 2014 |title=How Medieval-Style Guilds Will Remake the Tech Behind Facebook and Google |magazine=[[Wired (magazine)|Wired]] |url=https://www.wired.com/2014/09/medieval-style-guilds-will-remake-tech-behind-facebook-google/ |url-access=limited}}</ref>

Patents loosely serve as a form of guild privilege in that they restrict potential newcomers to a field of service. The idea of a patent being applied to intangibles (e.g. intellectual patents) has been called to question by various authors. In ''Capital and Ideology'' (2000) Thomas Piketty questions the validity of patents being granted to agricultural corporations who claim to have 'invented' certain GMO seeds. According to Piketty, the falsity of such claims is that the specific breakthrough which allowed for the development of these GMO seeds was in fact only the outcome of generations of ''public'' investment in education and research.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Piketty |first=Thomas |title=Capital and Ideology |publisher=Galaxy Books}}</ref>