The liberal professions begin in cognate amateur and volunteer pursuits. Discussion in this chapter is organized according to the public-centered professions (in art, science, sport, entertainment) and their client-centered counterparts (e.g., law, medicine, education, architecture, engineering). Amateurism in the latter type is pursued in the educational programs leading to professional certification, given that, to practice in these fields, its practitioners must acquire such validation.

The liberal professions discussed later constitute a sample of the total of such occupations in modern Western society. The principal object is to present an apercu of each that both describes it and its activities and shows how it conforms to the six criteria for occupational devotion. The sample is meant to be representative of the liberal professions, though limited to those on which there is some qualitative research or online information on their nature.

Public-Centered Professions

Pursuit of these professions tends to conform to the involvement scale that was introduced 30 years ago (Stebbins 1992, 46–48). There I observed that, at any point in time, serious leisure enthusiasts may be classified as either devotees or participants. The devotees (later some may become occupational devotees) are highly dedicated to their pursuits, whereas the participants are only moderately interested in it, albeit significantly more so than casual leisure dabblers. Participants typically greatly outnumber devotees. Along this dimension, devotees and participants are operationally differentiated primarily by the different amounts of time they commit to their serious leisure, as manifested in engaging in the core activity, training or preparing for it, reading about it and similar indicators.

This was, however, a rather crude scale of intensity of involvement in a serious leisure activity, a weakness not missed by Siegenthaler and O’Dell (2003). Their findings from a study of older golfers and successful aging revealed that data on leisure career are more effectively considered according to three types, labeled by them as “social,” “moderate” and “core devotee.” The moderate is equivalent to the participant, whereas the social player falls into a class of players who are more skilled and involved than dabblers but less skilled and involved than the moderates (participants).