Сакс СОЦИОЛОГИЯ ПРОФЕССИЙ – РАЗВИВАЮЩЕЕСЯ НАПРАВЛЕНИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ M. Saks The sociology of professions: A developing field of study Introduction It is encouraging to note the growing academic interest in the sociology of professional groups from law to medicine in a global context. <...> The first specialised journal to appear two or three years ago was Professions and Professionalism, an online Nordic sociology publication. <...> The second is Professions and Organization, a print and online journal produced by Oxford University Press – the initial issue of which is to appear in 2014 and on which I am a member of the Editorial Board. <...> This of course is in addition to other more general and longstanding Anglo-American journals focused on the sociology of work which publish articles on the professions, such as Work, Employment and Society and Work and Occupations. <...> This growing interest in the sociology of professions is further indicated by the particularly strong recent expansion of the membership of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee 52 (Sociology of Professional Groups), of which I am currently Vice President – having been President for four years from 2009 to 2012. <...> The activity of the ISA Research Committee on the Sociology of Professional Groups, with a membership drawn from some thirty countries has been paralleled by the related work of Research Network 19 (Sociology of Professions) of the European Sociological Association (ESA), of which I am a former Board member. <...> Selected papers from ESA and ISA conferences, moreover, have appeared in several special edited collections and journal issues, of which I have often been co-editor (see, for example, [Professional identities in transition, 1999; Saks, Kuhlmann, 2006]. <...> This has complemented the ever-increasing number of national sociological groups focused on professions, which can be exemplified by the strong sub-groups of the German Sociological Association and the Portuguese Sociological Association. <...> The Russian sociology of professions I have had a particularly close association with the Russian sociology of professions since the second half of the 1990 s and count a number of sociologists working in this field as both colleagues and friends. <...> My contact with Russia began in the late 1990 s when I was invited by Valery Mansurov, Deputy Director of the Institute of Sociology at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, to put in a collaborative bid for funding in this area under the INTAS <...>